"Governor Romney released an ad today alleging that the Obama administration had weakened the work requirements of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act," Clinton said in a statement Tuesday evening. "That is not true."
The 1996 reform ended welfare as a federal entitlement and transformed it into a program run by states within certain federal rules. Last month, the Obama administration announced it would allow states to apply for waivers from some of the rules if states had better ways of getting welfare recipients into jobs.
Mitt Romney and a slew of other leading Republicans on Friday slammed the Obama administration's decision to relax some welfare requirements, despite the fact that Republican-led states sought the policy change.
Mitt Romney's latest television ad attacks the Obama administration for announcing a "plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements." It's a strong allegation, but according to a former Republican congressional aide who was key to crafting welfare reform in the 1990s, it's also not true.
As The Huffington Post's Arthur Delaney has pointed out, this waiver policy was sought out by Republican governors. In a release defending its waiver request from conservative backlash last month, the office of Utah Gov. Gary Herbert (R) said, "Utah's request for a waiver stems from a desire for increased customization of the program to maximize employment among Utah’s welfare recipients."
In 2005, as Massachusetts governor, Romney also signed a letter in support of a waiver policy -- a fact left out of his new TV ad.
Romney Spokesperson said the absolute worst thing in response to an Obama SuperPac Ad
The commercial casts Mitt Romney’s business background in a severely negative light, but it's not a typical slash-and-burn attack ad. Instead, it features former GST Steel employee Joe Soptic speaking to the camera about what happened when the plant where he worked shut down.
"I don't think Mitt Romney understands what he's done to people's lives by closing the plant. I don't think he realizes that people's lives completely changed," Soptic said. “When Mitt Romney and Bain closed the plant, I lost my health care and my family lost their health care. And a short time after that my wife became ill.”
In 2006, Soptic's wife passed away.
On Fox News, Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul went "off-script," and amid a larger declaration about the ad being despicable and some pushback on the facts of the ad, she offered this statement in Romney's defense: "To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney's health care plan, they would have had health care."
After that came the deluge of conservatives savaging Saul for getting lost on the road to Damascus, essentially accusing her of giving away the election.
The fury, in this instance, was led by Red State founder Erick Erickson, who earnestly tweeted: "OMG. This might just be the moment Mitt Romney lost the election. Wow." Ever since then, he's been blogging about Saul's statement as if it were a massive disaster, assuring his readers that "Mitt Romney’s ardent supporters are fit to be tied today." Rush Limbaugh has since piled on, telling his listeners that "Andrea Saul's appearance on Fox was a potential gold mine for Obama."
Obama Ad Alleges Romney Role in 'Notorious' Tax Scandal
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) recently ignited a firestorm of criticism by saying, in an interview with The Huffington Post, that a Bain investor had told him that Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. The presumptive GOP nominee has refused to release his tax returns for the years before 2010 despite bipartisan calls for him to do so.
In 2009, the United States won an unprecedented agreement from Switzerland to reveal the names and secret accounts of Americans stashing money in their banks. The IRS then made a public offer of amnesty for any Americans who would come clean about unreported income being hidden in overseas accounts. Anyone who didn't come Read More... forward would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. More than 4200 people took the offer.
Romney has released his tax returns for 2010, and says he will release them for 2011. But that's where he's draw the line: He refuses to release 2009 ...
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