Newt Gingrich: 'No proof' that Romney's welfare attack is accurate

The Obama campaign debunked Romney's false ad in this web video Newt Gingrich is standing behind Mitt Romney's false welfare attack ad against President Obama, but at least he's being honest about why:

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.