Democrats, 'fact checkers' wrong about Romney welfare ads

Mickey Kaus:

“Our most effective ad is our welfare ad”–Romney ad strategist:

1) Told you so;

2) It was clear at an Atlantic/National Journal forum in Tampa this morning that the MSM is very proud of itself for abandoning traditional “false balance” and declaring in its own voice that Romney’s ads are wrong. A front page news (not opinion) article in the New York Times simply asserts:

The Romney campaign is airing an advertisement falsely charging that Mr. Obama has “quietly announced” plans to eliminate work and job training requirements for welfare beneficiaries …

The only trouble with this inspiring reclamation of journalistic manhood is that … Mr. Obama did quietly announce what certainly seemed like plans to eliminate work and job training requirements for many welfare beneficiaries.  Bring back false balance.

3)  Romney’s ads are overstated and oversimplified–some of them say Obama has ended the work requirement, not that he plans to end it.** But they get at a decidedly non-trivial point, which is that Obama’s department of Health and Human Services is undermining at least two aspects of the historic 1996 welfare reform law: a) That recipients should be required to “Work First,” at the best job they can get, rather than be paid to prepare for a better job that may or may not materialize down the line; and b) that we want to get welfare recipients into jobs quickly because that’s the best way to get them out of poverty–but we also want to require work to deter would-be recipients from making the bad choices that would put them onto welfare in the first place.

4) I didn’t think Obama supporters would resort to crudely arguing that talking about welfare is really talking about race–a historic loser complaint for them. I was wrong. Maybe voters suddenly love being told that their concern for a work ethic makes them racist, and that legitimate misgivings about the dole–voiced, in the past, by Bill Moyers and Piven and Cloward, not to mention Bill Clinton–are really a “dog whistle” to bigots.

5) Would a “dog whistle” tactic even make any sense? As John Ellis notes, it can’t be about white working class men–Romney’s already got them in his pocket. The ads are more likely to appeal to disillusioned women who voted for Obama last time–and to anyone who thought the welfare issue had been settled, or who worries more broadly that Obama was not the neoliberal he appeared to be in 2008 (when he ran ads boasting about … slashing the welfare rolls). If there are millions of racists in the electorate, it’s hard to believe they were seriously thinking of voting for Obama until … wait,! the dog whistle!**

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Kaus notes that Bill Clinton's most effective ads were also about welfare and ask if Democrats think he was racist.  What complicates the Democrats arguments is what Obama said, and how the program works.  Trying to explain it never quite satisfies the doubts of those who think Romney is right.  Obama can't seem to bring himself to step back from the edge he has already leaped from.  The NY Times and the "fact checker" mafia are angry that their explanations of what Obama "really meant" are not working with the Romney team or even worse as far as their are concerned it is not working with voters who are not buying it.