PolitiFact, Vanity Fair, Romney; Veracity?

There are times when I take exception to PolitiFact Truth-O-Meter depictions. Did you notice I specifically focused on the Meter? 

Ah yes, I often find the PolitiFact analysis 'dead-on", but an equal number of times, and often regarding the very same article, I get the impression PolitiFact uses Interns to assign the meter ratings. In those cases, the analysis and the depiction simply do not match.  

As I watched a Romney clip on ABC, I was absolutely startled that he said President Obama (paraphrased) "does is not inclined to tell the truth", I decided to take the biggest Lie Romney? Ryan are telling and check a few fact checkers. 

The Truth-O-Meter 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."

Mitt Romney on Monday, August 6th, 2012 in a campaign ad

Mitt Romney says Barack Obama’s plan for welfare reform: "They just send you your check."

An ad from Mitt Romney attacks Barack Obama on welfare reform.

Forget, for a moment, tax cuts and the fiscal cliff. Mitt Romney wants to talk about welfare.

A Romney ad opens with a picture of President Bill Clinton signing the 1996 landmark welfare reform act, which shifted the program from indefinite government assistance to one based on steering people toward employment and self-reliance.

The words "unprecedented success" flash on the screen. Clinton and a bipartisan Congress, a narrator says, "helped end welfare as we know it by requiring work for welfare."

A leather-gloved laborer wipes sweat from his forehead.

"But on July 12," the ad continues, "President Obama quietly announced a plan to gut 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 you your welfare check, and ‘welfare to work’ goes back to being plain old welfare."

The July 12 announcement, made by the the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, allows states to try different ways of meeting the work requirements of the federal law. Does it really mean "they just send you your welfare check"? We decided to look further.

The HHS memo

Since 1996, welfare has been administered through block grants to states through a program called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. TANF, as it’s called, limits how long families can get aid and requires recipients to eventually go to work. It also includes stringent reporting requirements for states to show they are successfully moving people off welfare and and into the workforce.

A memo from George Sheldon, the acting assistant secretary at HHS, said the department wanted to give states more flexibility in meeting those requirements. The memo notifies states "of the Secretary’s willingness to exercise her waiver authority ... to allow states to test alternative and innovative strategies, policies, and procedures that are designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families."

The memo outlined, using the jargon of a federal bureaucracy, the kinds of waivers that would be considered. It suggested projects that "improve collaboration with the workforce and/or post-secondary education systems" and "demonstrate strategies for more effectively serving individuals with disabilities," to give two examples.

What does all that mean?

"If you can do a better job connecting people to work, we would consider waiving certain parts of the performance measures and use alternate measures," is how Liz Schott, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, translated the memo’s point. (The center supports the plan.)

Schott, who studies welfare policy, said TANF sets guidelines for what activities may count toward meeting the law’s work requirements: jobs, job training, internships or school, to name a few. Beyond that, it puts restrictions on how many hours a welfare client may spend at school, or how many consecutive months they can attend before that activity no longer counts toward the work requirement.

The result: "States are running less-effective programs than they might be, because they are so driven by performance measurement as it’s set forth in the federal law," Schott said.

The waivers, then, would allow for flexibility. For example, someone with a special-needs child might require different work arrangements than are currently allowed. Or a person who needs to improve his or her English skills might need more time to take classes.

"It’s really about the underlying program," Schott said. "The real starting place is: What’s the most effective program to get this person to work?"

Romney’s assertion

In a memo released along with the ad, the Romney campaign says the change "undermines the very premise of welfare reform. It is an insult to Americans on welfare who are looking for an opportunity to build better lives for themselves. And it is a kick in the gut to the millions of hard-working middle-class taxpayers struggling in today’s economy, working more for less but always preferring self-sufficiency to a government handout."

Obama, it says, "hopes states will consider approaches that remove work participation rate requirements all together."

The HHS letter contains no such language. In several places, it says only proposals from states that "improve employment outcomes" will be considered.

It’s important to note, however, that the waivers would not just be a change on paper. Schott said it’s possible that waivers will allow states to get credit under the work requirement for things that don’t count currently.

That possibility has critics of the proposal up in arms. Robert Rector, a welfare expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said it could ultimately allow "state bureaucrats" to count activities that aren't really work.

The Romney campaign also contends that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is not legally allowed to waive the existing work requirements. Rector argues that the part of the law allowing waivers does not cover TANF work provisions.

"Critically, this section, as well as most other TANF requirements, is deliberately not listed... its provisions cannot be waived," Rector wrote in a July 12 column in the National Review.

We think that’s a noteworthy point, but it’s one that a court will have to settle.

Our ruling

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!

As you and I both know, there are more campaign lies from Mitt Romney. As I consider his body of (Lies) work, his archive must be quite extensive.  One notable example, a former employee at Bain told Vanity fair, Romney directly suggested that employees speak in ways less than honest for sake of benefiting the Bain mission. 


Vanity Fair

Where the Money Lives

© RUTH TOMLINSON/ROBERT HARDING WORLD IMAGERY/CORBIS (BEACH); BY JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES (INSET).

BURIED TREASURE Grand Cayman, where Bain Capital maintains at least 138 funds. Inset, Mitt Romney tries to spot his La Jolla home from the campaign plane.

A person who worked for Mitt Romney at the consulting firm Bain and Co. in 1977 remembers him with mixed feelings. “Mitt was … a really wonderful boss,” the former employee says. “He was nice, he was fair, he was logical, he said what he wanted … he was really encouraging.” But Bain and Co., the person recalls, pushed employees to find out secret revenue and sales data on its clients’ competitors. Romney, the person says, suggested “falsifying” who they were to get such information, by pretending to be a graduate student working on a proj­ect at Harvard. (The person, in fact, was a Harvard student, at Bain for the summer, but not working on any such proj­ects.) “Mitt said to me something like ‘We won’t ask you to lie. I am not going to tell you to do this, but [it is] a really good way to get the information.’ … I would not have had anything in my analysis if I had not pretended. 

“It was a strange atmosphere. It did leave a bad taste in your mouth,” the former employee recalls.

I posit Mitt Romney is a strange person. 

© RUTH TOMLINSON/ROBERT HARDING WORLD IMAGERY/CORBIS (BEACH); BY JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES (INSET).

BURIED TREASURE Grand Cayman, where Bain Capital maintains at least 138 funds. Inset, Mitt Romney tries to spot his La Jolla home from the campaign plane.

A person who worked for Mitt Romney at the consulting firm Bain and Co. in 1977 remembers him with mixed feelings. “Mitt was … a really wonderful boss,” the former employee says. “He was nice, he was fair, he was logical, he said what he wanted … he was really encouraging.” But Bain and Co., the person recalls, pushed employees to find out secret revenue and sales data on its clients’ competitors. Romney, the person says, suggested “falsifying” who they were to get such information, by pretending to be a graduate student working on a proj­ect at Harvard. (The person, in fact, was a Harvard student, at Bain for the summer, but not working on any such proj­ects.) “Mitt said to me something like ‘We won’t ask you to lie. I am not going to tell you to do this, but [it is] a really good way to get the information.’ … I would not have had anything in my analysis if I had not pretended. 

“It was a strange atmosphere. It did leave a bad taste in your mouth,” the former employee recalls.

I posit, Mitt Romney is a strange person!