PPI’s Will Marshall, with years of experience in welfare reform during the Clinton years, criticized the false attacks by the Romney campaign on the Obama administration’s so called “dismantling” of work requirements to receive welfare. In his article in the Daily Beast, Marshall explains how Romney’s cynical politics are “simply false.”
Republicans really miss welfare—the issue, not the program.
For decades, they used it to drive a wedge between Democrats and white working-class voters. But the GOP had no choice but to drop “welfare queens” from its lexicon after President Bill Clinton signed a landmark bill in 1996 “ending welfare as we know it.”
Now Mitt Romney, running a thoroughly retro presidential campaign, is trying to bring the issue back to life. With all the subtlety and scrupulous regard for fact his campaign has shown in other attacks on President Obama—which is to say, absolutely none—it’s now accusing Obama of “unilaterally dismantling” the 1996 law by bureaucratic fiat.
What triggered this hyperbole was a Department of Health and Human Services decision last month to grant states waivers from federal welfare rules to help them cope with the effects of a prolonged economic slump. Liberals have had a field day noting that Romney’s attack on the HHS is doubly hypocritical: first because some Republicans were among the governors asking the agency for more flexibility, and second, because devolving decisions from Washington to the states is supposed to be a core principle for conservatives.
Proving once again that he does not fear the hobgoblins of inconsistency, Romney brushed such criticisms aside while stumping in Iowa on Wednesday. Instead, he accused the Obama administration of having “removed the requirement of work from welfare.”
That is simply false.
Read the entire article HERE.
