Mitt’s “Gut Welfare” Campaign Ad: Incompetence? Absurdist? Humbuggery? Overconfidence? Cynicism? Confusion? Desperation? Constipation? All The Above?
Previously I’d believed the expression “Lies, damned lies, and Gingrich” was the northern star of the many versions of the original “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Move over, Newt. Meet the Romney campaign. Its latest manipulation of the voting public – the infamous “gut welfare” ad – is certainly not their first, it is among their more blatant.
With its recent campaign ad, Team Romney makes wild claims about a new Health & Human Service initiative. The new HHS program, announced this year in mid-July, permits states to request limited waivers to specified requirements of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)program in order to operate experimental, pilot, or demonstration projects involving work requirements in TANF’s so-called workfare programs. Romney’s campaign ad asserts that this will gut the welfare-to-work requirements of the Clinton/Gingrich era Welfare Reform Act of 1996. Here’s the text of the Romney campaign ad, entitled Right Choice:
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. And welfare-to-work goes back to being plain old welfare. Mitt Romney will restore the work requirement because it works.Through this memorandum, I am instructing agencies to work closely with State, local, and tribal governments to identify administrative, regulatory, and legislative barriers in Federally funded programs that currently prevent States, localities, and tribes, from efficiently using tax dollars to achieve the best results for their constituents.
This kind of state empowerment is something the Romney campaign and the GOP en masse has for decades been bellyaching for, but, as we know by now, when a President Obama obliges, getting what they want is tantamount to treason. Irony has become GOP strategy.
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, find, 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 state-empowering TANF waiver program arose from President Obama’s February
memorandum, and the subsequent stakeholder meetings HHS conducted. Also, the following excerpt just leaps off the page, and, quite frankly, into the faces of the GOP and Team Romney:
[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 vocal and aggressive states’ rights advocates than Utah and Nevada. So, with the HHS TANF waiver program, they got what they asked for, and, of course, Romney’s negative and dishonest ad now implies that Utah, Nevada, and others requested and received a waiver program that enables them to “gut workfare.” Sure, Mitt, as your ad implies, Utah and Nevada just want to 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. Last week, 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. Innovation. Work requirements intact. States as “laboratories” . . . But, as noted above, if Obama agrees, then suddenly the resulting waiver program is sinful. This reaction is a working out of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s famous accidental truth-telling, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Yet, all that’s come before this point in our story is merely prologue to one unfortunate and revealing incontrovertable fact. Read on.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
And in the Romney camp it’s a requirement.
– Your editor.
And here, my friends, is the kicker: Back on July 18th, well before the Romney campaign attack ad presently airing, Congressman Sander Levin wrote about the waiver program:
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. [Emphasis 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 “gut” welfare ad in Titanic melodrama is the proof of what Levin wrote about last July, the fact that in 1995, as Massachusetts Governor, Romney supported a TANF waiver program (see his signature on the National Governors Association letter below; note other conservative or downright wingnut signatories as well).
cynically calculated humbug? Is it absurdist, simply underscoring our unsettling suspicion that we humans really don’t have any inkling of what’s going on? 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-conspirators with President Obama and HHS Secretary Sebelius in an alleged plot to gut TANF work requirements? I mean, come on! The flap doodle the campaign is pedaling is easily researched – the administration’s waiver policy 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 or absurdity? Like most complexities, it’s all, and more. These attributes are so noticeable in Romney’s campaign because their brand of lying, incompetence, and surrealistic absurdity have reached astronomical heights and velocities. Yes, incompetence, yes, haphazard, yes, ludicrous, a nasty brew, but it’s pumped up as well with a dash of overconfidence and seasoned with a few tablespoons of confusion about where their own candidate actually stands on almost any issue. 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, primarily as a massive “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 voters have already made up their minds, an unusual event this early in the election cycle. If it’s indeed a close election in the offing, as most pollsters believe and common sense seems to indicate, then Team Romney knows it must woo independent voters who are among that large group of voters who have settled on Obama away from their choice. These voters tend to be rather thoughtful: How does flap doodle like Romney’s gut welfare attack ad help that cause? 
So, what else is the Romney 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? Are they nervous about their base? That fear might explain the welfare attack ad, but what does it say about their campaign when it feels it necessary to score points with its supposedly solid base? So, rather than overconfidence, does this arise form its opposite? Oy! In the end, Romney’s campaign team may be struggling for cohesion in an environment of fractious advisers and staffers, groups perhaps separated by major disagreements 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. Also, how well do they understand their own candidate? My bet is Mitt’s not too much more forthcoming with his own boosters than he is with the general public. For whatever reasons, the effect is to cause the Romney war room to look like a virtual lying machine manufacturing cynicism, often glaringly poor at basic research, with incompetence the inevitable result. The “gut welfare” ad has all these telltale signs all over it, the unfortunate Romney “brand.” Nonetheless, despite all this, in an America so angry and torn, is it enough to win? P.S. By the way, despite the refutation of Romney’s “gut welfare” ad and the attendant publicity, the ad is still running. 
