So it’s finally, officially, over: Newt Gingrich suspended his campaign today, though he denied the press what many sought in a “crowded ballroom” today, an actual endorsement of Mitt Romney. That will provide Newt still another opportunity for attention at some future date.

Instead of providing news, it appears Newt tormented the assembled media by making a long speech reciting all those “ideas” that thrilled audiences throughout the primary season. It’s not too hard to hear the exasperation in Ginger Gibson’s account:

Going forward, Gingrich said: “Callista and I are going to focus on a series of key issues … and try to educate and move policies in Washington, D.C. Probably central to this is a deep commitment to American exceptionalism.”

He provided few specific details about his plans, but during his lengthy suspension speech recapped the entirety of his policy positions and vowed to continue to work on them.

That was a promise, and a threat.

Last week the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to kill a program that offered states bonuses for doing a better job of enrolling eligible low-income children in the Medicaid and S-CHiP programs. This was part of the House Republican effort to pretend to implement the Ryan Budget Resolution, which was not, of course, actually enacted by Congress. So it pretty clearly represents their priorities.

In Matt Dobias’ report on the action for Politico, there’s lots of talk from Republicans about how the bonuses undermine tough policing of the programs for possible fraud, and boost costs that states might have trouble covering when the bonuses run out. On the other side of the argument is Ron Pollack of the advocacy group Families USA:

The whole purpose of the funds is to make sure that children who are eligible based on state-determined standards have an easier time — rather than a harder time — getting enrolled.

Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, however, said he sees a broader divide at play.

“In Congress and across the country, there are philosophical differences about whether public programs should be available to everyone with as little effort as possible,” he said. “And there are others who believe they should be made available, but don’t beat down their doors to force it on them.”

I’d say the “philosophical differences” run a little deeper than that. Why do we offer health insurance to low-income children? Is it because we just want to do them or their parents a favor? Or is it because giving kids basic health services tends to save an incredible amount of money in the long run, in chronic illnesses that might otherwise be prevented or managed, in expensive emergency room visits they won’t have to make, in costs that the rest of us will eventually bear? Could it even be that we value health as an end in itself, and would like to reduce the number of unnecessary deaths from untreated health conditions? Is it possible we think healthier children produce a healthier, happier, more prosperous country?

Oh, sorry, I forgot. Anyone sharing that sort of “philosophy” might also see the value of universal health coverage, instead of treating the very idea as a socialist abomination sure to lead to health care rationing and euthanasia. That doesn’t describe our current breed of congressional Republican.

I’ve mentioned the ongoing TNR symposium on “Obama and Populism” a couple of times in the lunchtime and day’s end notes, and since my submission was published today, figured I’d give you a taste of the discussion.

Asked to discuss whether Obama should wage a self-consciously “populist” general election campaign, Geoffrey Kabaservice kicked off the colloquoy with a piece arguing that the populist style is alien to Obama’s personality and background:

Obama makes a far likelier target than tribune of populism. Obama is nobody’s idea of “just folks.” He’s too cosmopolitan, multiracial, professorial, self-controlled, and physically fit to present himself as an incarnation of the American common man. His otherness has always inclined him toward an E Pluribus Unum approach rather than Us Against Them. He’s too sophisticated to pretend that politics is a straightforward clash of good and evil, that vile elites conspire to enslave the little people, or that the experience of balancing the family checkbook and raising children is adequate preparation for governing the United States. Rage-choked sobs, low quavering moans, righteous bellows, whoops, hollers, hallelujahs—none of these are in his repertoire. He doesn’t do anger. The political strain Obama most obviously seeks to channel is not populism but some mix of John F. Kennedy’s cool, Dwight Eisenhower’s moderation, and Abraham Lincoln’s gravitas. The ability to do a convincing imitation of Huey Long just isn’t in him. Populist pandering would undermine the only-adult-in-the-room persona he has worked so hard to establish.

While acknowledging that there’s plenty of raw material out there for a “populist” campaign, Kabaservice believes Obama just can’t credibly pull it off—but nor, fortunately, can Mitt Romney.

In another submission published today, Ruy Teixeira offers a very different take focusing on specific general election messages. Unlike Kabaservice, he believes a populist message is possible and indeed unavoidable: “[C]urrent polling suggests that to not do so would be political malpractice.” But he argues for what he calls an “aspirational populism” that broadens the blunt class-based “fairness” argument into a call for restoring opportunities for individual upward mobility:

[T]his aspect of his populism has received less play than his general emphasis on fairness. That needs to change. He needs to double down on the argument that inequality is a drag on mobility and growth and articulate a strong aspirational program to go along with it. President Obama wants you to go to college! Or get the training you need! Or start a business! Or do whatever fits your definition of getting ahead! And here’s how we’re going to help you do it. Oh, and did I mention that my opponent’s program provides you with nothing, since it consists entirely of giving more money to those who already have a lot?

read more »

When Mitt Romney blurted out the other day that “even Jimmy Carter” would have approved the operation to kill Osama bin Laden, he invited some pretty pointed criticism (especially, as we noted here, from James Fallows) for treating the 39th president as no more than a symbol of weakness. But it seemed a passing reference to many.

But now today in a campaign rally in Northern Virginia, Romney seems to have Jimmy Carter on the brain, this time in the context of domestic issues, as Politico’s Reid Epstein reports:

Romney, who has built his campaign pitch around the idea that Americans remember better economic times, sought to draw a contrast between the current economy and the one during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

“It was the most anti-small business administration I’ve seen probably since Carter,” he said. “Who would’ve guessed we’d look back at the Carter years as the good ol’ days, you know?

So what’s up with this? Republicans routinely scold Obama for any hint of blaming George W. Bush for the state of the economy or of the federal budget. Jimmy Carter left office well over thirty years ago, and like most ex-presidents, built a generally positive reputation, though one that has suffered recently (yet is still in positive territory) thanks to some highly controversial foreign-policy statements. Why is Mitt Romney running against Jimmy Carter?

For one thing, it should be remembered that Romney is still in the mode of trying to reassure GOP conservatives that he’s “one of them.” Carter was vanquished by Ronald Reagan, so the identification of Obama with Carter creates a framework where MItt is the new St. Ronnie. The parallels were drawn most directly by Romney in a March WaPo op-ed about how he’d deal with Iran, in which he draws upon Reagan’s behavior towards the mullahs as though quoting from Holy Scripture. Going a tad deeper, it’s not just a matter of creating warm and fuzzy associations with conservatives’ favorite president since Calvin Coolidge: Reagan “proved” that the Republican Party could win not only despite because of taking a decisive conservative turn. That’s precisely what they’ve been trying to do since Election Day 2008.

But I suspect the main reason for bringing up Carter and Reagan is a message to the media: the appropriate precedent for this election is 1980. Then, as now, you had an incumbent Democratic president with a poor economy who tried to make the election something other than a straight referendum on his record. It didn’t work, and it won’t work for Obama, either, so the media should ignore all of the incumbent’s efforts to make the election a choice of “two futures” and instead stare monomaniacally at the economic indicators and Obama’s job approval rating, even if Mitt’s out there saying crazy things to fire up his conservative “base.”

This became most apparent immediately after Obama’s tough speech last month to the newspaper editors association blasting Paul Ryan’s budget and suggesting that the general election campaign “will probably have the biggest contrast that we’ve seen maybe since the Johnson-Goldwater election.” Romney immediately went on Fox News and challenged that parallel:

“I think the contrast is better — not so much Goldwater and Johnson — but more Carter and Reagan.

I think this president represents a throw-back to the old style Democrats of the past — big government, welfare state Democrats, and that most Democrats moved away from that.

Most of the arguments we’ll hear from the two campaigns about historical precedents for this election will continue to more or less involve Democrats talking about 1964 and Republicans talking about 1980, even if it winds up looking more like 2004. But for Mitt, it’s a big-time two-fer: comparing Obama to Carter and Reagan to himself is sweet music to the ears of conservatives, and it’s very important to keep telling the people covering this campaign that all he needs to do to win is to cross a low threshold of credibility and let the economy drag Obama down.

* After bad bout with pizza (the pizza won), I’m back to healthy snacks today. Here are a few mid-day treats:

* Gingrich campaign lurches to an end $4 million in debt. And this was the guy who was going to restore fiscal responsibility in Washington (along, of course, with the traditional family).

* CREW asks FCC to cancel Fox broadcast licenses because of News Corp’s behavior in UK phone-hacking scandal. It ain’t happening, but an interesting shot across the bow.

* Another profile in courage from a WV Dem: Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin says he, like Sen. Manchin, not sure he’ll vote for Obama.

* Romney rally in NoVa has women, women, women ever-present in supporters and rhetoric. They can read polls.

* At TAP, Amanda Marcotte analyzes hipster-bashing of latest American Crossroads ad.

And in non-political news:

* Joan of Arc’s 600th birthday celebrated in France.

Until today, I was only vaguely aware that Scott Brown’s campaign and its allies were trying to make a big deal out of Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s past self-identification (and once, her identification by Harvard Law School) as a “Native American.” It mainly caught my attention because, like Warren (and for that matter, like many white people I’ve known from North Georgia or Oklahoma), I have a Cherokee ancestor, a great-great-grandmother as it happpens, though I’ve never self-identified myself that way.

Then I ran across a Boston Herald (the original source of the whole story) column by a certain Howie Carr that shows exactly how ugly and overtly racial this attack-line has become. It’s not, in fact, really about Elizabeth Warren, but about an increasingly aggressive effort on the Right to invent a nightmare-world where incompetent women and minorities are lording it over the poor afflicted white male.

Keep in mind that there is not a shred of evidence that Warren ever benefitted in any way from her self-identification; indeed, every university who’s hired her in the course of her very distinguished academic career has indicated they weren’t even aware of it, and certainly didn’t make it a factor in employing her.

That doesn’t deter Carr from asserting that “Pocohantas” Warren “parlayed the racial-spoils racket all the way to a tenured position at Harvard Law,” or that her case “shows just how morally and intellectually bankrupt ‘affirmative action’ is.” For good measure, he lurches into an equally unsubstantiated claim that President Obama got a “free pass to Columbia and Harvard Law” because of his race.

Look, I can understand how people can legitimately question this or that aspect of academic affirmative action policies, but this seething hatred against any woman or minority member who has won a measure of success in a system where white men still massively, overwhelmingly run the country is just bizarre. Anyone looking at Barack Obama or Elizabeth Warren and immediately seeing the beneficiary of a “spoils racket” is just deranged beyond redemption—or perhaps, in Carr’s case, just cynical beyond belief.

In the extensive discussion of the Mann-Ornstein op-ed calling out Republicans as “the problem” in causing polarization and gridlock, there’s been some griping about their characterization of Democrats moving slightly to the left while GOPers have moved violently to the right. And it’s not just an academic point: many progressives think the “real” problem isn’t asymmetrical polarization but the feckless and fruitless pursuit of compromise by Democrats even as Republicans pull the entire political system ever further to the right.

Here’s Kevin Drum from a post late yesterday:

[T]he truth is that both sides haven’t moved away from the center. Only Republicans have, and Democrats have spent the past 20 years chasing them in hopes that eventually they could reach some kind of reconciliation. But it never did any good. The Democratic move rightward was interpreted not as a bid for compromise somewhere in the middle, but as a victory for a resurgent conservative movement that merely inspired them to move the goalposts even further out.

Is it any wonder that so many Democrats are no longer in any mood to appease the right? It hasn’t exactly been a winning strategy for liberal ambitions, has it?

The planted axiom in this familiar argument is that Democrats have “moved right” (a characterization that Kevin notes does not apply to every issue, viz. gay rights, cap-and-trade, and “maybe a couple of other arguable cases”) strictly in order to accomodate or seek compromise with conservatives. That’s not necessarily the case, at least for the party as a whole.

On some issues, notably welfare reform, Democrats “moved right,” if that’s what you want to call it, for a combination of reasons that initially had little to do with cutting deals with Republicans: the existing system wasn’t working very well to accomplish its own stated goals, and was massively unpopular with voters of every persuasion. Yes, Bill Clinton wound up compromising with Republicans on actual welfare reform legislation in 1996 (after vetoing two significantly more draconian bills), but was pursuing his own version of welfare reform before Republicans gained the power to force him to the table.

On health care, it’s not accurate to say that Barack Obama embraced the framework for what became the Affordable Care Act strictly because Republicans had supported something similar. A private-sector-based “managed competition” proposal was in the mix earlier, back during the ClintonCare debate, and was supported by a lot of fairly conventional Democrats, such as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In the 2004 and 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, every candidate other than Dennis Kucinich proposed a “hybrid” system as well, and not because they were anticipating negotiations with congressional Republicans. A single-payer system, while popular among many liberal Democrats, was never some party-wide policy preference that was later “abandoned” by Clinton or Obama, and the polling on it never showed it to be a world-beater, either. Maybe these two Democratic presidents should have pursued it anyway, but again, it’s not so clear that a craving for Republican approval was the key, much less the only, factor.

Why does this question even matter? That’s simple enough: now that everyone agrees “bipartisan compromise” on most vital issues has been made simply impossible by the devolution of the GOP into a rigid ideological cult, Democrats still have to decide what policies to propose, and still must, to the limited extent possible, try to govern. And there’s still not an automatic, default-drive “true progressive” position on many national priorities other than resistance to conservative assaults on the New Deal, the Great Society, corporate regulation, environmental protection, civil rights, and peaceful international cooperation.

Once the specter of feckless bipartisanship is banished, there will remain internal disagreements among progressives, so we might as well get used to it and stop pretending it’s a simple choice between courage and cowardice.

Has the Obama campaign been unfair in its suggestion that Mitt Romney would not have gone after bin Laden the way the president did? Many pundits have said so, and Romney himself complained about it yesterday.

At issue is a web ad the Obama campaign put out last week that contains a quote Romney gave to AP reporter Liz Sidoti in 2007: “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.” The charge is that the quote was taken out of context. “The valid Romney observation that defeating al Qaeda would require a comprehensive strategy, not one limited to hunting down a single man, got distorted by the Obama scriptwriters into a hesitation to pursue Bin Laden” writes former Bush adviser Peter Feaver. Politifact makes the same argument: “The Obama campaign is right that Romney used those words, but by cherry-picking them, it glosses over comments describing his broader approach. Romney said he wanted to pursue all of al-Qaida, not just its leaders.”

But that is not what Romney said. Here’s the transcript of the AP interview that the Romney campaign itself put out:

LIZ SIDOTI: “Why haven’t we caught bin Laden in your opinion?”

GOVERNOR MITT ROMNEY: “I think, I wouldn’t want to over-concentrate on Bin Laden. He’s one of many, many people who are involved in this global Jihadist effort. He’s by no means the only leader. It’s a very diverse group—Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood and of course different names throughout the world. It’s not worth moving heaven and earth and spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person. It is worth fashioning and executing an effective strategy to defeat global, violent Jihad and I have a plan for doing that.”

SIDOTI: “But would the world be safer if bin laden were caught?”

GOVERNOR ROMNEY: “Yes, but by a small percentage increase—a very insignificant increase in safety by virtue of replacing bin Laden with someone else. Zarqawi—we celebrated the killing of Zarqawi, but he was quickly replaced. Global Jihad is not an effort that is being populated by a handful or even a football stadium full of people. It is—it involves millions of people and is going to require a far more comprehensive strategy than a targeted approach for bin laden or a few of his associates.”

Note that Romney’s not saying he wants a wider effort against al Qaida. He’s saying he wants a wider war against the “global Jihadist effort” including Hezbollah, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. A few days later, in an interview on MSNBC when he attempted to walk back the “heaven and earth line” he doubled down on his commitment to confront the “worldwide jihadist network.” He was thus aligning himself with the wider war that the neo-conservatives called for and the Bush administration pursued, and he was clearly criticizing Obama and the many Democrats who called for rejecting that wider war in favor if a narrower focus on al Qaida.

This is not a small distinction. It is the essence of the decade-long dispute between Republicans and Democrats over how to respond to 9/11. Republicans have generally favored a broad “war against terrorism” or “Islamo-fascism.” Democrats in general, and Obama in particular, have favored a narrower war against al Qaida and have long complained that the broader GOP strategy was folly—because it committed us to fighting terrorist groups that haven’t directly attacked us, stirred up resentments in the greater Muslim world and, most of all, led the Bush administration to take its eyes off the ball in Afghanistan, which is how bin Laden was able to escape to Pakistan. Bush himself said of bin Laden “I truly am not that concerned about him,” and while the military and intelligence agencies were actively trying to find the al Qaida leader during the entirety of Bush’s term, and those efforts contributed to his ultimate capture, it was clearly not the president’s highest priority.

The real “context” of that 2007 quote, then, was Romney aligning himself with the Bush position of downplaying both bin Laden and al Qaida in favor of a broader war on the “worldwide jihadist movement” and against Obama’s call for a more intense and focused effort aimed at bin Laden and al Qaida.

The real question, then, is not whether Romney would have given the order to send in the Seals once bin Laden’s hideout was known. Maybe he would have, maybe he wouldn’t have. The real question is whether he would have chosen, as Obama promised and did, to redouble efforts to find bin Laden. If we take Romney at his word, context and all, he clearly would not have. And if that redoubling of effort was what was required to find bin Laden—and by all indications it was—then Romney would never have had the chance to give the order, and bin Laden would still be alive.

The employment and resignation of openly gay Romney foreign policy spokesman Ric Grenell has not cast Team Mitt in the most favorable light, making them look like wimps who first boasted of the benevolent tolerance exhibited by the Great White Father in hiring the man, but then fell silent the moment the incoming began from social conservatives who implicitly said: “This is the sort of thing we warned you he’d do the moment he won the nomination!” It was not lost on the chattering classes, BTW, that the chatterer breaking the news in a series of angry posts was none other than WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin, arguably the most relentless Mitt-o-phile in the conservative universe.

Now, finally, the pushback is beginning to emerge from the Romney camp, most notably in an article today from the Washington Examiner’s Byron York, one of the Right’s most influential political reporters:

Romney campaign officials say strongly that they did not keep Grenell under wraps or in any other way discourage him from taking the job. First, they point out that at the time (last week) in which Grenell was supposedly being held back, he was not yet an employee of the Romney campaign. Like a number of other new hires, officials say, Grenell was getting ready to move to Boston to begin work May 1. Romney officials fully anticipated he would begin his public role as spokesman then.

Instead, last weekend, officials say, Grenell got in touch with the campaign to say he would not take the job, after all. Some top Romney staffers, including Eric Fehrnstrom, one of Mitt Romney’s closest advisers, urged Grenell to reconsider. In all, several Romney aides encouraged Grenell to come to Boston and start work. Whatever the criticisms from social conservatives, officials say, they wanted Grenell on the job.

In other words, Grenell wasn’t out there speaking for Romney, and Romney didn’t lift a finger to defend Grenell, because he was just some soon-to-be new employee who hadn’t filled out his withholding forms or been issued his stapler and bathroom key. He quit before he was hired, so don’t ask us about it, ask him!

But why would Grenell do this? York doesn’t quite say, but his article suggests, twice, that it was about “gay politics.” The very broad hint is that Grenell planned all along to make himself a martyr to the cause, and basically used poor Mitt—and presumably Jennifer Rubin—to draw attention to the fact that an awful lot of Republicans consider him a filthy sodomite who should have stayed in the closet.

My, my. This is some pretty aggressive spinning, folks. Mitt’s just going about the business of saving the country he loves, and has gotten mousetrapped by an alliance of bible-thumping homophobes and gay rights activists, as has his favorite blogger, Ms. Rubin, who should have ignored Grenell’s phone calls and stuck to safer subjects like the imminent realignment of Jewish voters into the GOP column.

We’ll see which story sticks.

I was reading Shira Toeplitz’s pre-obituary of Sen. Dick Lugar’s politial career at Roll Call when this passage—noting his quaint attachment to the obligation to show up for Senate votes—caught me up short:

Lugar’s presence is everywhere, but he is not. Thirteen days before the primary, Lugar is voting in Washington, D.C., before he returns Friday for the race’s final stretch.

It’s not uncommon for Members to miss votes before a primary — especially if there’s a good chance they will lose. But Lugar’s staff balked at the suggestion that he could tarnish his 98 percent lifetime attendance record in the Senate.

Lugar wouldn’t skip votes when he was running for president in 1996, spokesman Andy Fisher said, even while his fellow national contenders such as then-Sens. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) frequently left Capitol Hill for the trail.

Dick Lugar ran for president in 1996? How did I forget that? I mean, I remember Bob Dole’s campaign, and Pat Buchanan’s wild ride that beat Dole in New Hampshire before burning out in a frenzy of faux-populist extremism, and Steve Forbes’ robotic flat-tax-fed bid, and Phil Gramm’s shameful waste of hard-earned donor dollars, and Lamar (!) Alexander’s plaid-shirt crusade to “cut their pay and send them home.” But Lugar?

Well, I guess his campaign was pretty forgettable, beginning with a seventh-place finish in Iowa, peaking with a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire, and then expiring before the end of February. He did run some campaign ads; here’s one that makes you realize how far the GOP has devolved over the past 16 years:

Yes, once upon a time, in living memory, self-identified conservative Republicans thought it made sense in a Republican presidential primary to stress their support for limitations on gun rights. No wonder Hoosier wingnuts built up a sense of resentment against the guy. How dare he elevate “common sense” over the Second Amendment! What a RINO!

I don’t know if the president’s trip to Afghanistan, the “security agreement” he signed, or the speech he made that was beamed back home, will be remembered much at all in accounts of the Obama presidency or of the Afghan war. A lot obviously depends on what happens next in Afghanistan, and there are dozens of things that can go badly wrong.

But the trip and speech did put an end, at least temporarily, to a pretty intensive campaign by Republicans to circumscribe the president’s ability to take credit for military or even foreign policy successes, which have been important in holding up his job approval ratings. Here’s how Salon’s Steve Koracki explained the gambit as “making Mitt look small”:

After Obama authorized a campaign video that suggested Romney wouldn’t have given the go ahead for the mission that killed the al-Qaeda leader, Romney and an army of Republican leaders and commentators cranked up the righteous indignation, blasting Obama for politicizing what should have been a nationally unifying commemoration. When their outrage was amplified by neutral and even some decidedly non-Republican media voices, it seemed possible that Obama really had gone too far and that a backlash might be brewing.

And so it was that Romney decided to spend Tuesday, the exact anniversary of the bin Laden raid, with Rudy Giuliani, who a decade after 9/11 is still routinely referred to by the press as “America’s mayor.” The two men - bitter enemies until very recently - showed up at a New York City firehouse for a pizza delivery photo op, then took turns shaming Obama….

But as the Mitt-and-Rudy show playing out, word was spreading that Obama had quietly left the country and arrived in Afghanistan….

[Obama delivered] was a dramatic, eloquent speech on an emotional day, witnessed live by tens of millions of Americans who are ready to put the war in the rearview mirror. Whatever political benefit Romney reaped from his appearance with Giuliani - and from the past few days of wailing by the GOP - evaporated on the spot. Romney seemed to recognize it, too.

“I am pleased that President Obama has returned to Afghanistan,” he said in a statement released after the speech. “Our troops and the American people deserve to hear from our President about what is at stake in this war.”

To put it another way, Obama’s ultimate response to demands that he not “exploit for political purposes” his role as commander-in-chief was to say “Watch this!” and then reappear on television screens live from Kabul. Presidents can make news however and whenever they want, and when they are performing legitimate national security functions, no one dares question their right to do so even if it’s in the middle of a reelection campaign. Team Romney might want to remember that next time it starts one of these kerfuffles over the president being too “political.”

Today we have a song actually titled “Daylight,” from the Kinks’ Preservation Act 1, the band’s 1973 rock opera/”concept album” that analyzed the conflict between capitalism and socialism in the UK as basically a new incarnation of the English Civil War. It showed how much distance the Kinks had traveled since the three-chord days of “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night,” though the critics hated it.

This is really just audio with some photos, but the song is very nice. Enjoy.

Boy, the news finally picked up, didn’t it? Here’s some final notes:

* Yesterday I complained about the lack of consistent interest in DC in state and local developments. That’s obviously not a problem out in the heartland, as evidenced by this beautifully angry outburst at the Missouri legislature by our good friend Blue Girl. You go, girl!

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer notes with interest that some law schools are beginning to reduce enrollments, partly because applicants are realizing there may be no jobs when they graduate.

* Greg Sargent reports on last week of campaigning for and against North Carolina’s Amendment One; initiative still leading in polls, but “anti” group much better organized.

* Kevin Drum offers wise and funny guidance on when to write about crazy talk by crazy people.

* TPM’s Erich Lach summarizes key findings of British parliamentary report on News Corp.’s phone-hacking scandal.

And in non-political news:

* Levi Johnston’s second child will be named Breeze Baretta, and yes, the middle name commemorates a brand of gun.

I’ve got a new TNR column coming out at midnight on the should-Obama-campaign-as-a-populist debate (Geoffrey Kabaservice has the first installment of this colloquoy today), so if you’re up late, give it a gander.

Selah.

May 1 became an international day to commemorate workers—and more specifically, to agitate for an eight-hour work day—in 1889, on the anniversary of the Haymarket Massacre of 1886 in Chicago. It was rapidly adopted around the world, though not, ironically, in the United States, when President Grover Cleveland adopted the Knights of Labor’s proposal for a September Labor Day (in part, it is likely, to avoid commemoration of the Haymarket disturbances, the lethal bomb throwed by persons unknown, and the police massacre of protestors that followed). Canada followed the U.S. example, but May 1 remained, in effect, Labor Day virtually eveywhere else, remaining today a public holiday in over 80 countries. Even the Catholic Church followed the tradition, creating a May 1 feast for St.Joseph the Worker.

For obvious reasons, notably their increasingly spurious claims to function as worker-led socialist republics, Communist regimes made a big show of May Day. But they never owned the day, any more than they owned (or even allowed to exist) the free labor movement it honored, or its very practical goals. And International Workers Day has long survived the virtual end of the “Communist Bloc” as we knew it, and of communist regimes in Europe entirely.

I’ve gone through this brief history in reaction to reading a post at the conservative legal site the Volokh Conspiracy promoting the idea, as it has since 2007, of renaming May 1 “Victims of Communism Day.” I’m sympathetic to the basic idea of a day for reflection on the bloody record of communist regimes, and of their false claim to serve as emancipators of the working class. But that’s all the more reason not to do anything to perpetuate the confusion of communism with legitimate movements for workers’ rights.

The chief advocate of a May 1 “Victims of Communism Day,” Ilya Somin, claims the most likely alternative, November 7, the date of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, inaugurating the first communist regime, is too “Russia-centric.” Well, May 1 is insufficiently “Communo-centric.” All the communist regimes trace their roots back to November 7, and they don’t share it with non-communists. For all I care, we can commemorate victims of communism any day other than May 1; maybe August 23, the anniversary of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which revealed even to the most naive the true nature of the Soviet regime and launched one of the most intensively horrific periods of bilateral murder in world history.

But leave May 1 to workers, particularly now that the eight-hour work day is again in peril.