A centerpiece of the Romney campaign’s case for throwing President Obama out of office was curiously absent from its presidential and vice presidential nominee’s speeches to the Republican convention this week.
The campaign has been under the media microscope for falsely portraying the president’s policy of allowing states to find new ways to move recipients from welfare to work as “gutting welfare reform.”
The word “welfare” did not appear in Mitt Romney’s address Thursday night, despite the fact that his campaign has spent millions of dollars in ads inaccurately attacking the policy, and that the claim features prominently in his stump speeches.
On Wednesday, Paul Ryan’s only mention of the word came in reference to criticizing what he called “corporate welfare” in the 2009 stimulus package. In his speech, he repeatedly portrayed Obama as eager to keep Americans dependent on government, but the pointed attack line on the president’s welfare waiver policy was nowhere to be found.
A growing roster of fact-checkers and traditional journalists have concluded that the claim is false — that the waivers, none of which have yet been granted, only apply to states that develop strategies to move a higher percentage of recipients into jobs.
By contrast, Romney’s and Ryan’s speeches included other prominent lines of attack they have used against Obama, including on the Affordable Care Act’s cuts to Medicare — and in Ryan’s case a variety of arguments that strained the facts or obscured context. Their speeches were well-received by the attendees and effectively rallied conservatives against Obama.
The omission of the welfare claim — which Romney’s own pollsters as well as outside GOP strategists have hailed as effective — raises the question of whether the campaign will retire the attack in response to public pressure. Veteran reporters, including National Journal editor-in-chief Ron Fournier, have forthrightly called out the claim as not only false but a deliberate exercise in race-baiting.
