President Bill Clinton signs welfare reform legislation into law, Aug. 22, 1996.
No sooner did the Romney campaign unleash its attack than the Obama campaign counterattacked, accusing Romney's operation of willfully distorting the truth.
While it gets somewhat complicated, here's an attempt to explain what all the fuss is about.
Romney's latest attack springboards off a July 12 Health and Human Services Department memo informing states that, under certain circumstances, the Obama administration would waive certain work requirements of the welfare overhaul law, so long as states could show that the added flexibility would allow them to move welfare recipients to work more effectively.
Such flexibility to allow states enough latitude under the law to try new approaches had been long sought from Congress by Republican governors including Romney, when he was Massachusetts governor but to no avail.
When the Obama administration announced its willingness to issue waivers, criticism from Republicans quickly followed.
Writing for liberal publication The Nation, Greg Kaufmann provides background on how the flexibility is supposed to work. A fact sheet from the conservative Heritage Foundation titled "Gutting Welfare Reform: Ending Welfare as We Know It" provides Republican objections to Obama's action.
Those objections are embedded in a new Romney campaign TV ad that Ed Gillespie, a GOP big gun and top adviser to the former governor's campaign, promised reporters on a Tuesday conference call will be in such heavy rotation that it should be hard for voters to miss.
The ad features an image of President Bill Clinton signing bipartisan welfare overhaul legislation in 1996 and video of people working. A narrator says:
"In 1996, President Clinton and a bipartisan Congress helped end welfare as we know it by requiring work for welfare. But on July 12, 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 would just send you your welfare check. And welfare-to-work goes back to being just plain old welfare. Mitt Romney will restore the work requirement because it works."
The ad seems meant partly to drive home the message for voters that Obama is no Clinton in anticipation of the higher profile the former president will assume in Obama's re-election campaign in coming weeks. Clinton will be a headliner at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, for instance.
But it also raised welfare as an issue in a way reminiscent of how Reagan used it in 1980. Then, Reagan famously used the image of a welfare queen driving a Cadillac as a metaphor for how liberals and big government had run amok, throwing the money of hardworking Americans at lazy welfare recipients.
On the Romney campaign conference call with journalists was Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz, the Tea Party-backed candidate who just won the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate from the Lone Star State. He echoed some of the criticisms of welfare from the days before the pre-1996 overhaul:
"It hurts the recipients of welfare. The most compelling reason behind the bipartisan welfare reform that we saw is that helping those receiving government assistance to get jobs, stand on their own feet, fundamentally transforms their lives. We're not doing anybody a favor by giving them welfare in perpetuity and making them dependent on government."
The "welfare in perpetuity" line was a particular throwback to the days before the 1996 overhaul, since a key part of the law signed by Clinton placed time limits on how long such benefits could be received.
One of several responses Obama's campaign issued throughout the day to Romney's charges cane from spokeswoman Lis Smith:
"Mitt Romney continues to make statements that he knows are both untrue and hypocritical. The Obama administration, working with the Republican governors of states like Nevada and Utah, is giving states additional flexibility only if they move more people from welfare to work not fewer. But as governor, Mitt Romney petitioned the federal government for waivers that would have let people stay on welfare for an indefinite period, ending welfare reform as we know it, and even created a program that handed out free cars to welfare recipients. These false and extremely hypocritical attacks demonstrate how Mitt Romney lacks the core strength and principles the nation needs in a President."
Smith's citing of Nevada and Utah referred to requests to the Obama administration by the Republican governors of those states for greater flexibility. But Obama and Romney's campaigns disagree on whether the governors were actually seeking flexibility on the work requirement.
The Obama campaign also directed reporters' attention to a BuzzFeed item by Andrew Kaczynski, who found circa-1997 comments from two Illinois Republicans praising Obama, then a state senator, for working across partly lines to help fashion welfare-to-work legislation in the Land of Lincoln.
Meanwhile, the new Romney attack is clearly meant to tap into public perceptions about welfare recipients. A recent Rasmussen Reports survey found that 83 percent of respondents supported the notion that adults able to work who are receiving welfare be required to get a job.
Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
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