2003 Granholm: ‘California, Eat Your Heart Out!’

The University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library has been releasing documents provided by former Gov. Jennifer Granholm from her two-term tenure as the state’s highest elected official. Among them is an excerpt from a 2003 speech.

“Few things really get my blood boiling, than when people – people who have never seen Michigan outside a conference room in one of our hotels – ask me: ‘Why in the world do you live in Michigan?’ You know, and they say ‘Michigan’ like it was a bad taste in their mouth. They don’t know because they’ve never seen this amazing state! They have never seen the soul of Michigan, have not dug their feet into the cool sand of our silver dunes, or gotten their shoes muddy in an apple orchard on a crisp, fall day. You need to stand on the rocks up north, on the shore of Lake Superior and let that huge expanse of blue make you feel completely inferior. You need to gape at the beauty of our Michigan homeland, not the sprawl of our cities, to really understand. California, eat your heart out!”

ForTheRecord says: Just 24 days after Granholm was term-limited out of office, she left what she called “this amazing state” for the Golden State. Granholm and her husband both accepted jobs at the University of California-Berkeley, which hired her Jan. 24, 2011. Granholm continues to live in California.