Mitt Romney versus Bill Clinton

Earlier this morning, Mitt Romney doubled down on his latest false attack, falsely accusing President Obama of unilaterally rescinding the work requirement from welfare:

He removed the requirement of work from welfare. It is wrong to make any change that would make America more of a nation of government dependency. We must restore, and I will restore, work into welfare.

Romney's claim is utterly ridiculous. He's referring to a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services to states encouraging them to apply for waivers to welfare rules so that they can experiment with different ways of running welfare programs. However, as the memo makes clear, any changes must lead to more welfare recipients getting work. Anything that reduces the amount of work will not be approved and would not be legal.

Romney's claim is so bogus that even Ron Haskins, one of the Republicans who helped write welfare reform, told The Huffington Post that "there's no plausible scenario under which it really constitutes a serious attack on welfare reform."

But Romney didn't just pick a fight with President Obama. He also picked a fight with President Clinton by featuring the former president so prominently in his ad. And Clinton's response to Romney's attack, issued yesterday, is scathing:

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 act emerged after years of experiments at the state level, including my work as Governor of Arkansas beginning in 1980. When I became President, I granted waivers from the old law to 44 states to implement welfare to work strategies before welfare reform passed.

After the law was enacted, every state was required to design a plan to move people into the workforce, along with more funds to help pay for training, childcare and transportation. As a result, millions of people moved from welfare to work.

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.

And Mitt's response? Silence:
On the ropeline in Des Moines, Romney did not answer our questions about Clinton's criticism of the welfare ad.
— @jimacostacnn via Twitter for iPhone Welcome to the big leagues, Mitt. If you lie, you're going to get called out for it.