Trying to turn the class debate around

Class War and Romney’s Welfare Counterattack

By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine

Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that states could submit new proposals to move welfare recipients to work, noting that it “will only consider approving waivers relating to the work participation requirements that make changes intended to lead to more effective means of meeting the work goals of TANF.” A pair of Republican governors applied for the waivers. This week, Mitt Romney’s comically mendacious campaign has turned this into a massive plan by Barack Obama to bring back welfare:

The political gist of this attack, like the “you didn’t build that” campaign, is to manufacture — out of thin air, if necessary — a way of turning the class debate around.

Obama has been attacking Romney as an advocate of top-down economics who would revisit the failed Bush-era ideology of regressive tax cuts and lax regulation that led to enormous income gains to the rich but income stagnation to the middle class. One startling thing about the campaign is how little Romney has done to prepare himself for such an obvious line of attack. George W. Bush crafted his entire campaign around preemptively defanging the accusation of succoring the rich. He cast himself as a brush-clearin’, pickup-drivin’ son of toil, and relentlessly insisted his tax plan was primarily aimed at poor waitresses and other low-income people.

(More here.)