Mitt Romney’s campaign has hit new depths of truth-twisting with its accusation that President Obama plans to “gut welfare reform” by ending federal work requirements. The claim is blatantly false, but it says a great deal about Mr. Romney’s increasingly desperate desire to define the president as something he is not.

Reacting to these kinds of requests, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a memo last month granting states some flexibility. If states can find better ways to get welfare recipients into jobs, they can extend training periods or grant certain kinds of exceptions. The department “is only interested in approving waivers if the state can explain in a compelling fashion why the proposed approach may be a more efficient or effective means to promote employment entry, retention, advancement, or access to jobs,” according to the memo. Kathleen Sebelius, the health secretary, said all waivers would have to move 20 percent more people from welfare to work.

This was hardly an earthshaking change. In fact, it was exactly the kind of flexibility sought in 2005 by 29 Republican governors, including Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. But conservative ideologues immediately waved the memo around to prove that Mr. Obama wanted to return to the bad old days of welfare, and inevitably Mr. Romney’s campaign followed suit.

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This could not be more wrong, but this is what happens when a flailing campaign searches for a wedge issue to gain popularity among blue-collar voters. Mr. Romney’s empty promises to magically turn around the economy are losing effectiveness, so why not vilify welfare recipients and portray the president as coddling them?

Mitt Romney spent Tuesday on a media blitz claiming that President Obama is out to “gut welfare reform.” An ad released by the Romney campaign first pointed to President Clinton as having successfully reformed welfare, before excoriating Obama. However, in a statement, Clinton called Romney’s charge against Obama “disappointing” and “not true”:

Governor Romney released an ad today alleging that the Obama administration had weakened the work requirements of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. That is not true. [...]

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.

The Romney ad is especially disappointing because, as governor of Massachusetts, he requested changes in the welfare reform laws that could have eliminated time limits altogether. We need a bipartisan consensus to continue to help people move from welfare to work even during these hard times, not more misleading campaign ads.

In reality, the Obama administration is simply giving states the ability to experiment with new work programs, along the lines of a reform that Romney himself requested in 2005.

Newt Gingrich admitted Wednesday evening that Mitt Romney's presidential campaign has no evidence the Obama administration dropped work requirements from the nation's welfare law, contradicting a Romney TV ad released a day earlier.
"We have no proof today, but I would say to you under Obama’s ideology it is absolutely true that he would be comfortable sending a lot of people checks for doing nothing," Gingrich told CNN's Anderson Cooper. "I believe that totally."

Gingrich is wrong, but at least he's admitting Romney's attack has nothing to do with actual facts and is instead based entirely on what Republicans believe about President Obama. In other words, Romney's attack is an expression of their own anxieties about what President Obama might at some point do in the future, not the reality of what the president has actually done.

Even Rick Santorum echoed that line of thinking, telling reporters on a conference call that Obama could "potentially gut" welfare reform at some point in the future. Yeah, sure, like Mitt Romney's might "potentially" release a tax return showing that he actually a 35 percent tax rate over the past decade. Still, "potentially" is a big difference from Romney's ad, which claimed Obama had already gutted welfare reform. Santorum's language tacitly concedes that Romney's claim is false.

Bottom line: Mitt Romney asked the guy who called Obama a "food stamp president" and the guy who said he wanted to stop giving welfare to "blah people" to defend his welfare ad. And neither one of them could do it.

Romney’s ad says, "Under Obama’s plan (for welfare), you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check."

That's a drastic distortion of the planned changes to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. By granting waivers to states, the Obama administration is seeking to make welfare-to-work efforts more successful, not end them. What’s more, the waivers would apply to individually evaluated pilot programs -- HHS is not proposing a blanket, national change to welfare law.

The ad tries to connect the dots to reach this zinger: "They just send you your welfare check." The HHS memo in no way advocates that practice. In fact, it says the new policy is "designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families."

The ad’s claim is not accurate, and it inflames old resentments about able-bodied adults sitting around collecting public assistance. Pants on Fire!