CNN 2012-08-13

Welcome to “Keeping Them Honest” tonight, two times with two powerful presidential campaign as one from each side. Now each one goes straight for the guts 2 seeking to enforce negative views about other governor Mitt 3 Romney over President Barack Obama. It’s a piece of a political fitter it’s tour to political welfare, each one is formidable, and each one is false as it’s not true. Tonight Keeping Them Honest, we will confront the defenders 4 of these stupid ads and as always, we’re not taking political sides. We’re simply trying to report facts. We begin tonight with the new Mitt Romney ad. 
 
 
 
In 1996, President Clinton and a bipartisan Congress helped end welfare as we know it, by requiring work for welfare. But on July 12th, President Obama quietly announced a plan to gut 1 welfare reform by dropping work requirements. Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send your welfare check. And welfare to work goes back to being plain old welfare. 
 
Well, in a moment, you’ll hear from Newt Gingrich who joins us to defend that ad. But it also makes a pretty stunning 5 envision about whether that ad he’s defending is strictly 6 speaking through the facts. But first, I want to show you how Mitt Romney is campaigning on the claims made in that very ad. 
 
 
 
With the very careful executive action, he removed the requirement of work from welfare. It’s 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. 
 
 
 
Now listening to that and watching the ad, you would think that the White House with a sweep of the pen somehow managed to undo 7 all your elected representatives, Democrats 8 and Republicans, accomplished 9 back in the late 90s on welfare reform. You get the impression the Obama administration wants an America where hardworking Americans pay taxes and lazy ones sit around collecting welfare. And in case you miss the implications, Romney’s surrogate Newt Gingrich today spelled it all out. 
 
 
 
I think on the hard left there is an unending desire to create a dependent America. It’s not just that Obama is radical 10 but the people he appoints are even more radical. 
 
 
 
Well, obviously, the White House, the Obama campaign, strongly disagreed. And they are not alone. A string of fact checkers have blasted the ad as false. Political facts gave us pants on fire rating. The Washington Post fact guy rated in with four Pinocchios. That’s their rating system. What， in fact， the White House and the department of health and human services proposed doing, was give governors more flexibility 11 to tailor programs for their own states. And these were changes, by the way, requested by the Republican governors Utah and Nevada. But what about this claim?
 
 
 
If President Obama didn’t want people to think that he was going to waive 12 the central work requirement in welfare reform, his administration shouldn’t have written a memo 13 saying it was going to waive the work requirements in welfare reform. 
 
 
 
Well, Keeping Them Honest, here’s the relevant portion from that very memo from the Department of Health and Human Services. And I quote, HHS will only consider approving waivers relating to the work participation 14 requirements that make changes intended to lead to more effective means of meeting the work goals. So the administration’s insisting they aren’t trying to waive the work requirement. They are in fact trying to make it less bureaucratic 15 and more effective precisely 16 what those Republican state governors had asked for. As we said, Newt Gingrich is defending the ad, going beyond to this as well in some respect. But as you will see later on in this interview,speaker Gingrich who I talked to just a short time ago, also makes a surprising admission. I spoke 17 with the former presidential candidate just a short time ago. 
 
 
 
Mr. Speaker, so this ad says, I quote, under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job, they just send your welfare check. Now according to pretty much every non-partisan fact checking organization, that’s not true. President Clinton who signed the law that he worked on it as well said it’s not true. Even Ron Haskins who worked in the original welfare law served with George W. Bush’s welfare policy adviser 18 said quote, there’s no plausible 19 scenario 20 under which this new policy constitute any kind of serious attack on welfare reform. Are they all wrong? 
 
 
 
Well, Robert Rector at the heritage foundation who was the originally developer of welfare reform, worked with Governor Reagan, and then President Reagan. He was the first person to come out aggressively and say look, this will in the end gut welfare reform. In this reason, he is pretty straight forward. Once she start allowing states, this is why by the way the law itself does not permit waivers. The president actually could not waive section 407, which says there can’t be any waivers to the work requirement. So he fudged and found a way to get around it which I suspect will turn out to be illegal. Governor McDonald of Virginia comes out and says this is clearly gutting 21 welfare reform. The two governors that the Obama administration is hiding behind, the governor of Utah and the governor of Nevada, have both come out and said that is not accurate. This is not what they wanted, this is not the flexibility they asked for. And I think that this is gonna become a genuine argument. Those of us who favor welfare reform and work hard to get it felt deeply that particularly in local states if you didn’t have some kind of strong requirement. You know, they used to have thing like getting massage 22 counted, going through drug rehab count it as a work program. And it was amazing the range of things prior to 1995, the year 1996 that you could do and pretend they were work.