Leadership Quote by Jennifer M. Granholm

Granholm’s line is a pressure tactic disguised as common sense: if everyone else is doing it, the only irrational move is to abstain. The opening sweep - “Every single country” - isn’t meant as a fact-checkable census so much as a cue for panic about global competition. It frames industrial policy as an international race, where hesitation reads like surrender. The rhetorical question “Why wouldn’t we…” is a trapdoor; it turns dissent into something that requires explanation, while support gets to feel like the default.

The key move is the pivot from “help this industry” to “because it needs 3.5 million jobs.” Jobs aren’t something an industry “needs” in the way it needs steel or credit; people need jobs. Granholm flips the dependency to humanize a corporate bailout and to make the industry sound like the vessel for national livelihood. That phrasing also blurs the line between saving companies and saving workers, a deliberate ambiguity that makes aid sound morally urgent rather than economically negotiable.

Context matters: this is late-2000s American politics, with the auto sector symbolizing manufacturing pride, Midwestern identity, and a broader fear of decline. By invoking other nations’ interventions, she’s also hinting at an uncomfortable truth for free-market purists: the market is already managed, just not always by us. The subtext is blunt: if the U.S. won’t underwrite its industrial base, competitors will - and the unemployment bill will arrive anyway, just under a different name.