Previously I’d believed the expression “Lies, damned lies, and Gingrich” was the northern star of the paraphrases of the original “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Move over, Newt. Meet the Romney campaign. Of course, its latest craven manipulation of the voting public is certainly
In any event, below is a portion of HHS Secretary Sebelius’s July 12, 2012 Information Memorandum (full text here). Do you see any gutting of work requirements?:
HHS is encouraging states to consider new, more effective ways to meet the goals of TANF, particularly helping parents successfully prepare for, fxind, and retain employment. Therefore, HHS is issuing this information memorandum to notify states of the Secretary’s willingness to exercise her waiver authority under section 1115 of the Social Security Act to allow states to test alternative and innovative strategies, policies, and procedures designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families.
States led the way on welfare reform in the 1990s — testing new approaches and learning what worked and what did not. The Secretary is interested in using her authority to approve waiver demonstrations to challenge states to engage in a new round of innovation that seeks to find more effective mechanisms for helping families succeed in employment. In providing for these demonstrations, HHS will hold states accountable by requiring both a federally-approved evaluation and interim performance targets that ensure an immediate focus on measurable outcomes. States must develop evaluation plans that are sufficient to evaluate the effect of the proposed approach in furthering a TANF purpose as well as interim targets the state commits to achieve. States that fail to meet interim outcome targets will be required to develop an improvement plan and can face termination of the waiver project.
Moreover, this TANF waiver program arose from President Obama’s February memorandum, and the subsequent stakeholder meetings HHS conducted. Again, referring again to the HHS Information Memorandum, this excerpt just leaps off the page, and, quite frankly, into the faces of the GOP and Team Romnney:
[During our stake holder meetings,][w]e also heard concerns that some TANF rules stifle innovation and focus attention on paperwork rather than helping parents find jobs. States offered a range of suggestions for ways in which expanded flexibility could lead to more effective employment outcomes for families. Two states – Utah and Nevada – submitted written comments that specifically identified waivers as one mechanism for testing new approaches to promoting employment and self-sufficiency, and a number of others states – including California, Connecticut, and Minnesota – have asked about the potential for waivers.[Italics added]
Ahem, Team Romney, ahem. There are few states as packed with governmental wingnuts as Utah and Nevada. So, with the HHS TANF waiver program, they got what they asked for, and, of course, Romney’s ad now implies that Utah, Nevada, and otheres were requesting a waiver program so that they could “gut workfare,” and just hand out welfare checks to all comers. Nevada? Utah? Ahem.
In truth, the initiative does not diminish the centerpiece welfare-to-work requirement of the 1996 welfare reform law. Yeaterday,former President Bill Clinton explained:
The recently announced waiver policy was originally requested by the Republican governors of Utah and Nevada to achieve more flexibility in designing programs more likely to work in this challenging environment. The Administration has taken important steps to ensure that the work requirement is retained and that waivers will be granted only if a state can demonstrate that more people will be moved into work under its new approach. The welfare time limits, another important feature of the 1996 act, will not be waived.
Sounds like something the GOP would welcome, does it not? Flexibility. Work requirements. States-as-“laboratories” . . .
– Napoleon Bonaparte
In politics, absurdity is not a handicap.
In the Romney camp it’s a requirement.
– Your editor.
Finally, the Committee on Ways and Means ranking Member Sander Levin summed it up well, and this was back on July 18th well before the Romney campaign attack ad presently airing:
For more than a decade we have heard pleas from Republican Governors to allow states more flexibility in achieving the goal of moving people from welfare to work. Even Mitt Romney supported more flexibility when he was a Governor. But now that the Department of Health and Human Services has responded to those repeated requests, Republicans claim it’s the end of welfare reform as we know it. That’s absurd.
Under a demonstration project, states must still achieve employment outcomes and there is no change to current funding levels or time limits on benefits. The only change is states are allowed to focus on outcomes, rather than on process and paperwork. Republicans used to support state flexibility, but now they seem to think Washington always knows best.” [Italics added]
So, as the inimitable Paul Harvey used to say, “That’s the rest of the story.” Mitt now excoriates the policy he once wholeheartedly supported. Again, like the campaign’s knee-jerk lying, this, too, is no surprise.
What really sinks the Romney ad in Titanic melodrama is what Levin wrote above:
in 1995, as Governor, Romney also supported a TANF waiver program (see his signature on the National Governors Association letter at the bottom of the page; note other signatories as well).
This, more than most of the campaign’s recurring gaffes (as in, accidentally telling the truth “gaffes”), points up the fact that Team Romney needs to do “opposition research” on its own candidate . . .
Is this ocean of glacier-sized mishaps and gaffe-driven advertising a sign of haphazard campaign management or is it cynically calculated humbug? Is it absurdist, simply underscoring that we humans really don’t have any inkling of what’s going on, a problem shared by us all? Does it reflect less on lying than on utter incompetence? Does the Romney campaign do so little research that it continuously gets caught in its lies, and, moreover, often thereby reveals that Romney once supported policies he now deplores? In the gut welfare ad does the Romney marketing team realize that in airing such a charge it would be holding up it friends, Utah and Nevada, as co-coinspirators with President Obama and HHS Secretary Sebeliusin in a plot to gut TANF work requirements?
I mean, come on! The flapdoodle the campaign is pedaling is easily researched – the administration’s waiver plolicy is clearly written, and, moreover, Romney’s own record on this waiver issue is – or should be – easily researched by the campaign’s own staff. Yet, they consistently fall on their faces, taking their candidate down another notch, as well as causing collateral damage by friendly fire on Utah, Nevada, and other states who requested the waiver program before its inception and July 12th announcement.
Lying or incompetence? Like most complexities, it’s both, and more, and noticeable in Romney’s campaign because lying, incompetence, and surrealistic absurdity have reached astronomical heights and velocities. Yes, incompetence, yes, haphazard, yes, ludicrous, a nasty brew, but including as well a dash of overconfidence as seasoning and exponentially more than a soupçon of distasteful confusion about where their own candidate actually stands on almost any issue. The last ingredient, I’d guess, is difficult to detect by the most sophiticated Team Romney palate . . .
How can this be? It’s a mosh pit of debilitating complexities. The Romney folks may be thinking they can say literally anything and still rely on their base plus a bunch of independent and dissatisfied Democrats to win the election handily, orimarily as a “I hate Obama: vote. That’s certainly got some resonance with American voters, yet the polls are not at all yet in Romney’s favor, if they ever will be. Polls also claim that most Amereicans have already made up their minds, and that this certainty is unprecedented this early in the election cycle. If it’s indeed a close election in the making, then Team Romney must know it needs to woo independent voters and others who resist yet claiming one of the candidates as their own. How does flapdoodle like this gut welfare ad help that? Independents and other hold-outs tend moire than others to be thoughtful people. This ad has little chance of passing scrutiny.
So, what else is the Romeny campaign thinking? Well, they may believe that repeating lies often enough will inure people to them, and, more importantly, many listeners will accept them as true. The GOP base, nurtured by Rush Limbaugh, does this, but the base alone is not enough to win this election. And anyway, why market ads like the “gut welfare” ad to the already decided base? Romney could declare the sun a planet, the ocean a desert, the earth flat, and the GOP base, now his base, would never doubt their hatred of Obama as far more critical than the possibility that their votes could put a liunatic in the oval office.
In the end, Romney’s campaign team may be struggling for cohesion in a fractious group separated by major diasgreement about how to proceed against a very popular President, despite the economic doldrums that put very real downward pressure on his chances for a second term. The Romney war room, though, is both a lying machine and an incompetence factory. In the end, in an America so angry and torn, is this enough to, not lose, but to win?
