The hardworking staff freely admits that we’ve often relied on sites such as FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com, and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker to question the campaign ads currently swarming the TV airwaves like gnats at a summer barbecue.
But we also freely admit we’re having second thoughts after reading the series of articles the Weekly Standard’s Mark Hemingway has written recently.
His first piece (“Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact Checking'”) took on the factcheck-industrial complex in general.
His latest examines one fact check in particular: Whether Mitt Romney’s claim that Barack Obama has “gutted welfare reform’s work requirement” is true.
Hemingway makes an effective case that Romney’s claim is true, and that the fact check hall monitors have been derelict in actually checking the facts.
Check it out, and decide for yourselves.
Campaign Outsider 
Hemingway’s welfare reform piece doesn’t pass the smell test. The original HHS memo states that only proposals that substantially increase the percentage who go back to work will be considered; proposals failing to show a substantial increase will be rejected. Sure, Sebelius only declared the 20% target in a later letter, but the memo is clear.
The fundamental problem that Hemingway fails to note is that since the Great Recession many states have been raising, not lowering, the threshold for qualifying for welfare. That doesn’t make sense during a downturn in employment, when the safety net should be expected to kick in not jettison people.
The reason states have done that is that they can’t meet the specific requirements of the welfare law during a significant economic downturn. The law’s requirements might have been set up to work well during a period of strong economic growth, but are a barrier during times of economic stress. Remember: it’s not some Democrat in the White House who is looking for these changes; it’s two Republican governors of red states.
I read the article on the “gutting of welfare reform” which in brief, claims that the fact checkers must be wrong because Robert Rector disagrees with them. Not very convincing. John Sununu made a similar argument and attacked Brooke Gladstone on “on the Media” a couple weeks ago.
Listen to Sununu’s (Silberesque) rant and see if you agree with my analysis. There seems to be a genuine dread of poor people and their terrible habits. A feeling that if they detect any weakness they will swarm all over their betters. Their program can only be defended with inflexiblity, paternalism (Check out Rector’s missionary-like prescriptions of abstinence and marriage for poor people.) and–most of all–resistance to any alliance between poor people and liberal do-gooders.
So no, the fact checkers aren’t wrong. Welfare reform isn’t being gutted. It’s just that the current arrangement has to be maintained at all costs. Otherwise it could blow up in their faces.