Tom Maguire reprints the White House version of Obama's role in the Wisconsin labor dispute and suggests we compare it with the video of his remarks. If you do, you know they are airbrushing history.

The Milwaukee television interview that was Mr. Obama's first involvement in the Madison budget war was sought by the White House not to interject the president into the state's fight but to promote his separate message concerning his own national budget-cutting drama: the station broadcasts into the district of the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, Representative Paul D. Ryan.

In the interview, the president sought to thread the needle between supporting the need for public employees to sacrifice while defending their bargaining rights: "Some of what I've heard coming out of Wisconsin, where they're just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain generally, seems like more of an assault on unions."

That comment was "inappropriate," Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on the NBC program "Meet the Press" on Sunday.

Roll the video.

Without the money from public serivce employee unions the Democrats cannot win and as the American Spectator reports , the Administration has been frantically behind the strikers.

The White House has been watching the Wisconsin state employee labor fight with a degree of alarm, says a White House aide: "I think all of us recognize what this could mean for us in the re-election fight," says the aide. "Without well financed labor, we're screwed."

For several weeks, now, the Obama Administration, with staff from the Labor Department and Department of Education, among others, have been setting up working groups to examine how, if at all, they could block or reverse in some way state-based rules and laws that would draw back labor unions' abilities to collect chunks of member pay for political purposes on the state and national level.

Clarice Feldman