August 30, 2012

Will Mitt Romney Back Down Tonight on His Welfare Attacks?

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Anybody want to offer odds on whether Mitt Romney will repeat his dishonest welfare attack during his big prime time speech tonight? If he does, will he go the cowardly route and soften it up so that it’s marginally defensible? Or will he have the guts to dive straight into the gutter and repeat his bald advertising claims that Obama is “dropping work requirements” and “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”?

My prediction: Door #1. He’ll repeat the claims, but in front of a big audience, with the press hanging on his every word, he won’t have the courage to repeat the specific claims he’s already made 6,000 times so far in his TV ads. With the whole nation watching, he’ll pretend that the ads don’t exist and instead offer up something just hazy enough that only the page A12 fact checkers will bother dissecting it. That’s how Mitt usually plays things, after all.

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THE BIG PICTURE

You expect the big picture, and it's our job at Mother Jones to give it to you. And right now, so many of the troubles we face are the making not of a virus, but of the quest for profit, political or economic (and not just from the man in the White House who could have offered leadership and comfort but instead gave us bleach).

In "News Is Just Like Waste Management," we unpack what the coronavirus crisis has meant for journalism, including Mother Jones’, and how we can rise to the challenge. If you're able to, this is a critical moment to support our nonprofit journalism with a donation: We've scoured our budget and made the cuts we can without impairing our mission, and we hope to raise $400,000 from our community of online readers to help keep our big reporting projects going because this extraordinary pandemic-plus-election year is no time to pull back.

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