Despite Fact Checks, Romney Escalates Welfare Work Requirement Charge
Ari Shapiro 08/22/2012
Wednesday marks the 16th anniversary of President Clinton's welfare overhaul. That law has become a major issue in this year's presidential campaign.
Republican Mitt Romney keeps saying that President Obama has gutted the law, even though every major fact-checking organization says the attacks are false.
Romney rolled out his line of attack two weeks ago in an ad that says: "On July 12th, President Obama quietly announced a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements. Under Obama's plan, you wouldn't have to work and wouldn't have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check."
Since then, it's become a constant refrain in more ads and on the stump.
"How in the world could he not understand the power of work, the dignity of work?" Romney said last week in Zanesville, Ohio. "And taking work out of welfare is something I'll change. I'll tell you that — day one."
The fact-checking website PolitiFact says Romney's claims are "pants on fire" bogus.
The Washington Post's fact checker awarded four Pinocchios, its highest rating.
And Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org reached the same conclusion, that the claims are false. FactCheck.org explains:
"A Mitt Romney TV ad claims the Obama administration has adopted 'a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements.' The plan does neither of those things."
"Work requirements are not simply being 'dropped.' States may now change the requirements — revising, adding or eliminating them — as part of a federally approved state-specific plan to increase job placement."
"And it won't 'gut' the 1996 law to ease the requirement. Benefits still won't be paid beyond an allotted time, whether the recipient is working or not."
Even a Republican architect of the law, Ron Haskins said: "There's no plausible scenario under which it really constitutes a serious attack on welfare reform."
Still, the accusation endures. The Republican National Committee released an ad Wednesday noting the 16th anniversary of the law, and stating: "If Barack Obama had his way, this day would have never happened."
And the Romney campaign put out a memo Wednesday repeating the claim that Obama gutted the Clinton-era welfare reforms after taking office.
So why continue beating this drum?
Partly because people believe it.
"We think that the fact that the work requirement has been taken out of welfare is the wrong thing to do," said Peggy Testa, attending a Tuesday rally near Pittsburgh for Romney running mate Rep. Paul Ryan.
When told that's not actually what had happened, Testa replied: "At this point, [I] don't know exactly what is true and what isn't, OK? But what I do know is I trust the Romney-Ryan ticket, and I do not trust Obama."
Another Romney supporter at the Ryan rally said it's really tough to know what's true anymore.
"I think we always have to look at who the fact checkers are," Ken Mohn said. "There's lots of ... groups that purport themselves to be neutral, nonpartisan, but often are [partisan]."
This specific attack about welfare ties into a broader concern that many Republicans share: Romney often argues that Obama and the Democrats are making America a government-dependent society.
Pam Malcolm, who attended a Romney rally outside of Cleveland a few months ago, agreed.
"I really don't want to help somebody who just decides, 'Oh, well, I was raised on welfare. I can raise my children on welfare,' " Malcolm said. "I had a cousin who, she is a registered nurse and the stories she told me about people coming in there and having babies just so they could get more on their food stamps and more on their welfare. It's like no, I don't want to take care of those people."
Princeton University political scientist Martin Gilens, who wrote the book Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy, said there's another unspoken factor in all of this.
"I do think a lot of it has to do with race," he said.
Gillens said his research shows that Americans think about welfare in a way that aligns pretty neatly with their perceptions about race. For example, whites tend to believe that most poor people are black. But actually, poor people are more likely to be white than black or Hispanic.
Gillens said it's impossible to know whether the Romney campaign decided to play into a racial strategy or whether it's an accident. But in a way, it doesn't matter.
"Regardless of what their conscious motivations are, the impact of these kinds of attacks on welfare and, in particular, on the perceived lack of work ethic among welfare recipients, plays out racially and taps into Americans' views of blacks and other racial stereotypes," he said.
Robert Rector of the conservative Heritage Foundation calls that claim preposterous.
"The left declared that welfare reform itself was racist," he said. "It's not a racial issue. It is an issue of extraordinary budgetary cost and an increasing level of dependence among all kinds of groups in our society."
Rector was co-author of a blog post on the Heritage Foundation website last month claiming that Obama "guts welfare reform."
So happy anniversary, welfare reform. On your sweet 16th, everyone is talking about you.
Last edited by Seti-Alpha 5; 08-22-2012 at 10:53 PM.
"I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them."
Adlai Stevenson 09/09/1952
Even a Republican architect of the law, Ron Haskins said: "There's no plausible scenario under which it really constitutes a serious attack on welfare reform."
Still, the accusation endures. The Republican National Committee released an ad Wednesday noting the 16th anniversary of the law, and stating: "If Barack Obama had his way, this day would have never happened."
And the Romney campaign put out a memo Wednesday repeating the claim that Obama gutted the Clinton-era welfare reforms after taking office.
So why continue beating this drum?
Partly because people believe it.
I think you could place the original document in front of their face and they still wouldn't believe you. It's human nature. They're going to listen to the person they identify with the most. Like the lady in the interview who said,
"[I] don't know exactly what is true and what isn't, OK? But what I do know is I trust the Romney-Ryan ticket"
all the time unwilling or unable to realize that most of Romney & Ryan's claims are lies. This just shows that facts don't really matter to some people.
"Now, in contrast you've got Gov. Romney creating as a centerpiece of his campaign this notion that we're taking the work requirement out of welfare, which every single person here who's looked at it says is patently false," Obama said. "What he's arguing is somehow we have changed the welfare requirement, the work requirement in our welfare laws. And, in fact, what's happened was that my administration, responding to the requests of five governors, including two Republican governors, agreed to approve giving them, those states, some flexibility in how they manage their welfare rolls as long as it produced 20 percent increases in the number of people who are getting work."
President Barack Obama in a Press Conference on 08/20/2012
" It’s incorrect to say Obama undermined welfare reform. Temporary Aid to Needy Families, as it’s formally known, is a $16.5 billion block grant to the states. In July, Obama invited states to apply for waivers that would give them greater flexibility to design programs that promote employment, while relieving them from some paperwork requirements. If granted, states would still have to move adults into jobs within two years and cap lifetime benefits (usually five years)."
“We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,”
says Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster. A half dozen fact-checking organizations and websites have refuted Romney’s claims that Obama removed the work requirement from the welfare law and will cut Medicare benefits by $716 billion.
Last Sunday’s New York Times even reported on its front page that Romney has been “falsely charging” President Obama with removing the work requirement. Those are strong words from the venerable Times. Yet Romney is still making the false charge. Ads containing it continue to be aired.
Presumably the Romney campaign continues its false claims because they’re effective. But this raises a more basic question: How can they remain effective when they’ve been so overwhelmingly discredited by the media?
The answer is the Republican Party has developed three means of bypassing the mainstream media and its fact-checkers.
The first is by repeating big lies so often in TV spots – financed by a mountain of campaign money – that the public can no longer recall (if it ever knew) that the mainstream media and its fact-checkers have found them to be lies.
A series of court decisions and regulatory changes, beginning with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizen’s United vs. Federal Election Commission, opened the floodgates to big money. Fully a quarter of the $350 million amassed by Super PACs through the end of July came from just ten donors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan group that tracks such spending.
And through political front groups masquerading as nonprofits charitable, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, corporations and Wall Street banks are making secret contributions — without even their own shareholders knowing.
The second means the GOP has developed to protect its lies is by discrediting the mainstream media – asserting it’s run by “liberal elites” that can’t be trusted to tell the truth. “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans,” Newt Gingrich charged at a Republican debate last January, in what’s become a standard GOP attack line.
To be sure, the mainstream media hasn’t always called it correctly. Initially it bought the Bush administration’s claim there were “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. But the mainstream media is at least committed to professional standards that separate truth from fiction, seek objective facts, correct errors, and disseminate the truth.
The third mechanism is by using its own misinformation outlets — led by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and his yell-radio imitators, book publisher Regnery, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, along with a right-wing blogosphere — to spread the lies, or at least spread doubt about what’s true.
Together, these three mechanisms are creating a parallel Republican universe of Orwellian dimension – where anything can be asserted, where pollsters and political advisers are free to create whatever concoction of lies will help elect their candidate, and where “fact-checkers” are as irrelevant and intrusive as is the truth.
Democracy cannot thrive in such a place. To the contrary, history teaches that this is where demagogues take root.
The Romney campaign has decided it won’t be dictated by fact-checkers. But a society without trusted arbiters of what is true and what is false is vulnerable to every lie imaginable.
Last edited by Seti-Alpha 5; 09-02-2012 at 07:25 PM.
Reply With QuoteOriginally Posted by Seti-Alpha 5
all the time unwilling or unable to realize that most of Romney & Ryan's claims are lies. This just shows that facts don't really matter to some people."[I] don't know exactly what is true and what isn't, OK? But what I do know is I trust the Romney-Ryan ticket"
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