Even before she was elected in November 2002, liberals had identified Michigan’s governor, Jennifer Granholm, as one of the fresh faces to watch: a post-feminist moderate who would bring not only a fresh face but fresh thinking to a tired old Democratic Party.

Among her heroes, noted the New Republic magazine admiringly, were not only such mold-breaking liberals as Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, but the conservative Prime Minister Thatcher of Great Britain “who took no guff and got it done.” So expectations were high for an interesting new style of governance when Ms. Granholm took office that might show Democrats how to get back in the game, not just locally but nationally.

Alas, Ms. Granholm spent most of her time appointing commissions to deal with the big problems, ranging from the severe loss of manufacturing jobs in Michigan to land-use reform to Detroit’s hapless school system. And in last week’s State of the State address, the kind of forum made to order for this Harvard Law School graduate with movie-star looks, she served up a veritable jeroboam of old Democratic wine in new bottles.

“Jobs Today, Jobs Tomorrow” was the speech’s theme. No doubt it has a particular resonance in Michigan. In the 1990s, Michigan boasted one of the lowest unemployment rates in the land, as a long-running boom papered over deep problems in the auto industry and encouraged the rise of new service industry. Today, Michigan’s unemployment rate, even after two years of fairly robust national recovery, is the second worst in the land at 7.3% behind Alaska. While other states are turning the budgetary corner, Michigan’s budget also remains deeply in the red.

But the Granholm response was to demand a New Deal-style mix of make-work. It included an acceleration of $800 million in already planned road repairs (though, unlike Franklin Roosevelt, Ms. Granholm insists that building new roads would only add to “sprawl”) and a $2 increase in the minimum wage to $7.15 an hour, a measure sure to cost teenagers a lot of jobs. But the centerpiece was $2 billion in borrowing to make Michigan “a global center for research in new technology and emerging industries” – in particular, the life sciences and “pollution-free” alternatives to the internal combustion engine.

“Michigan, the Great Lakes state, could be the state that finally makes these United States independent of foreign oil,” she cried, clearly swept up in her grand vision.

But if we know anything about government, it’s that it isn’t very good at picking which technologies and which industries are likely to produce the jobs of the future. It’s one thing to bond for infrastructure. It’s another to bond for operating a jobs program. When asked about the particulars, Ms. Granholm confessed that the actual plan for spending the $2 billion isn’t ready yet, though she insists it will create 72,000 jobs.

Such pie-in-the-sky spending is fashionable these days: California, Washington, New York, and a number of other states also are planning to turn themselves into meccas for the life sciences. And in fairness to Ms. Granholm, the bright shiny vision of reinventing the auto industry through alternative fuels was given a big boost by a Republican, the former Energy Department Secretary, Spencer Abraham, himself once a U.S. Senator from Michigan. Mr. Abraham committed the federal government to spending hundreds of millions in researching a “hydrogen economy.”

But research is one thing. The hoary old notion of actual independence from foreign oil, which harks back to Jimmy Carter and beyond, is another. If Ms. Granholm were really serious about jobs, she would have a word or two with her friends in the environmental community, who have all but shut down oil and gas development in Michigan and elsewhere. If it’s jobs you want, nothing would help quite so much as bringing the price of oil back down from $45-$50 a barrel.

Republicans in Michigan and elsewhere need to do a better job themselves of pressing for tax and regulatory reform if they want to credibly oppose the job-creation nonsense put forward by Democrats like Ms. Granholm. But Republicans in the Michigan legislature were right to sit in stony silence while Ms. Granholm argued in favor of saddling average Michiganians with huge subsidies for well paid engineers and scientists to pursue unrealistic dreams.

Mr. Bray is a Detroit News columnist.