My Sunday column explores some of the recent gains in manufacturing employment in Minnesota and the U.S. While reporting for that column I was struck by how much Chrysler's new commericals are resonating with people. Even before the great Super Bowl ad, Imported from Detroit, Chrysler had been running this powerful ad:

I think this commercial strikes a chord for a number of reasons:

1. It speaks to the overall anxiety many of us feel about the exporting of good, high-paying manufacturing jobs and the erosion of the American middle class. We will never again see the day when 35 percent of the American labor force works in the manufacturing sector, but does it have to keep shrinking? Can't it be more than the current level of 10 percent?

2. It speaks to the anger, still palpable, about Wall Street causing the Great Recession, but Main Street paying the price. The things they make on Wall Street can't be touched, seen or trusted.

The ad flatly delcares,

Do you think this is true?

I stumble over the word "make." Does that mean only things that are hammered, stitched or forged from steel? We made Google and Facebook. Do they make us Americans?