Romney repeats charge Obama is 'gutting' welfare reform. Is that a distortion?
Mitt Romney on Wednesday doubled down on charges that President Obama plans on 鈥済utting鈥� welfare reform by easing work requirements for recipients.
In doing so, his campaign repeated assertions widely condemned by Democrats and independent fact-checkers as inaccurate. Is Mr. Romney unfairly misrepresenting the administration鈥檚 record in this area?
Romney鈥檚 claims are a 鈥渄rastic distortion鈥� of planned changes to the existing Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, . The website gave the charges its lowest rating, 鈥淧ants on Fire."
First, a little background: The presidential campaign is suddenly mired in a swamp of dubious assertions, half-truths, and unfair conflations.
Senate majority leader Harry Reid鈥檚 statement that Mitt Romney may have paid no taxes for 10 years leads the way here. Senator Reid has sourced his information to an unnamed Bain Capital investor, but he has refused to provide any further evidence for this explosive charge, or to release any further tax information of his own.
On Tuesday, the pro-Obama "super PAC" Priorities USA Action released a harsh ad dealing with GST Steel. Purchased by Romney鈥檚 Bain Capital in 1993, the firm went bankrupt in 2001. In the ad, ex-GST worker Joe Soptic notes that he lost his health insurance as a result of the failure, and that his wife later died of cancer.
The ad makes no mention of the fact that Romney says he had left Bain two years prior to GST鈥檚 collapse, that Mr. Soptic鈥檚 wife had her main health insurance through her own employer, or that she passed away in 2006.
In this context, on Tuesday Romney went after the Obama administration on welfare, a hot-button issue of the 1980s.
Romney鈥檚 campaign聽 that opened with then-President Bill Clinton signing the landmark 1996 welfare reform act. The narrator notes that the historic bill 鈥渉elped end welfare as we know it by requiring work for welfare."
It then continues by saying that on July 12 President Obama announced a plan to 鈥済ut welfare reform鈥� by dropping work and job-training requirements. 鈥淭hey just send you your welfare check,鈥� says the narrator.
White House spokesman Jay Carney blasted this charge, calling it 鈥渃ategorically false鈥� and 鈥渂latantly dishonest," among other things. Fact checkers mostly agreed with this judgment of the spot.
What the Obama administration has actually done, noted PolitiFact.com, is to say that the Department of Health and Human Services will consider waivers allowing the states to try new ways of meeting the work requirements.
An example of a project that might qualify for a waiver includes an effort to 鈥渋mprove collaboration with the workforce and/or post-secondary education systems," notes an HHS memo. (Yes, as PolitiFact notes, that鈥檚 fairly vague bureaucratic language.)
Critics of the move, such as the Heritage Foundation鈥檚 Robert Rector, say the real result of the change will be to undo work rules. And the Romney team wasn鈥檛 backing down on Wednesday, with spokeswoman Andrew Saul that 鈥渋t took years for President Clinton and Republicans in Congress to pass historic welfare reforms 鈥� but it only took President Obama an instant to undo the legislation鈥檚 historic work requirements."
The administration鈥檚 defenders, meanwhile, say the real point of the attack is to revive the welfare-queen meme of the 1980s.
鈥淭he claim that Obama is quietly bringing back the old welfare system is perfectly designed to bring back the old politics of the 1980s, when Republicans constantly (and often successfully) sought to pit middle-class voters against the poor, while distracting attention from the vast welfare system supporting corporations and the wealthy,鈥� wrote Ed Kilgore on the Washington Monthly鈥檚 .
