Although he didn't have a lot of experience, Brian Owens was selected to be the new CEO of an expansion NFL franchise. The good news was that the team owners had plenty of money and Owens could hire almost any head coach he wanted. Owens' favorite team in his youth was the Detroit Lions, a team which despite occasionally having good talent was almost never able to hire a coach which could turn that talent into a playoff contender. Still, Owens approached the current coach of the Lions and hired him for the new team, despite the Lions having at that time the worst record in the NFL, not having won a game more than halfway through the season and despite that coach not having done anything memorable in football prior to his job with the Lions. Football experts just scratched their heads at the decision, predicting the new team would have a losing record for several years to come if the decision-making at the top were to remain that bad.

While Bernie O'Brien had a law degree, he had very little business experience. Still, his charisma was seen to be a valuable tool for the company which was in need of a turnaround specialist, so they hired O'Brien at interim CEO despite his thin resume. The company seemed to have the necessary pieces to be a success, but it hadn't been successful for a few years. The owner of the company had very deep pockets (it was thought that the money might have come from many years of white collar crime, but that was never proven), and O'Brien was told that he could put together a Board of Directors of his choosing. Over recent years, O'Brien had become friends with Joan Grandy, who had become President of O'Brien's kids' favorite toy company. It was a company which had a long history of making great toys but which had fallen on hard times for many years, for a few decades even, because their dated toys came to have limited appeal for modern tastes and because the company was never able to lower their costs, making the toys more expensive than many of the alternatives. Grandy, unfortunately, was so concerned with making sure the employees loved her that she never made any hard decisions and simply let the company continue to do what it was doing, causing the grand old toy brand to now be on the verge of bankruptcy after a century of history. Maybe Grandy's failure shouldn't have been a surprise since she had no prior business experience. So, it was seen as somewhat odd by stock analysts when O'Brien chose Grandy to be one of the members of the company's new Board of Directors. After all, they wondered, how could someone who has never demonstrated an ability to improve the financial situation she was in charge of be expected to do so for a much bigger company just because a friend asked her to?

And so it is with the remarkable inclusion of Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm in the economic advisory team for President-Elect Barack Obama.

Michigan is an economic basket case. The state has been in recession for far longer than the rest of the country, with unemployment persistently higher than the national average during Granholm's tenure. According to the Detroit News, "Metro Detroit now stands as the only major metropolitan area in the country where average home prices have fallen below their 2000 levels." Of course, tax-and-spend Granholm almost always sees the answer in higher taxes (HERE, HERE, HERE) , even though it should be clear to a blind and deaf person that Michigan's already high taxes are a main cause of the problem.

Jennifer Granholm has presided over, and continues to preside over, one of the great failures of an American state and American industry. So what is she doing on Obama's economic advisory team? Representing labor unions is my guess, as well as generally receiving payback from Obama for her support during his campaign. If this is the sort of "hope and change" we can expect from Obama (and I believe it is), he will soon prove right those of us who said that he should not be allowed to run a small company, much less the nation. Truly, I can not imagine a worse economic advisor than a failed governor with no experience in the business world. But then what do you expect from a President-Elect with no experience in the business world?

What's worse, I would not be surprised to see Granholm offered a cabinet position or maybe an appointment to the federal bench as a judge. After all, they're birds of a feather: They are both graduates of liberal colleges (Columbia for Obama, Berkeley for Granholm) and Harvard Law School, they both love unions, taxes, and government spending, and they both have exceptionally limited understanding of economics...and the little they do know they learned on the job while making terrible economic decisions.