# A widower's grief and a welfare memo: the 2012 ads both camps got wrong Case studies A widower's grief and a welfare memo: the 2012 ads both camps got wrong Illustration, not an archive object - Home - Case studies - A widower's grief and a welfare memo: the 2012 ads both camps got wrong At a glance In one August 2012 week, a pro-Obama super PAC tied Mitt Romney to a steelworker's wife's death, and Romney's campaign said Obama had dropped welfare work WhenAugust 7, 2012ActorPriorities USA Action…Full record at propagandaarchive.org ## What it said Within two days of each other in August 2012, one ad from each side of the presidential race drew the harshest verdicts the main fact-checkers hand out. Both were built from real events. Both arranged those events into a picture the events did not support. On 6 and 7 August, Romney for President released "Right Choice." Over footage of Bill Clinton signing the 1996 welfare law, the narrator credited Clinton and a bipartisan Congress with requiring work for welfare, then said: On July 12th, 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. "Right Choice," Romney for President, August 2012, as quoted by PolitiFact and recorded on the FRAME case study. Sequels within about two weeks said 'welfare to work' goes back to being plain old welfare and that Obama has a long history of opposing work for welfare, citing a 1999 speech from his time in the Illinois state senate. On 7 August, the super PAC Priorities USA Action released "Understands." Joe Soptic, a former worker at GST Steel in Kansas City, said that when Romney and Bain closed the plant he lost his health insurance, that a short time after that my wife became ill, and that she died 22 days after her diagnosis. He said he did not think Romney realized what he had done or was concerned. ## What the fact-checkers found On the welfare ad: PolitiFact rated the claim Pants on Fire. The Washington Post Fact Checker gave it Four Pinocchios. FactCheck.org said the plan did neither of the things the ad described. CNN called the claim false. The July 12 document was an Information Memorandum from the Department of Health and Human Services inviting states to apply for waivers to test new ways of meeting the goals of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Secretary Kathleen Sebelius described it to Congress as a very limited waiver opportunity for states that develop a plan to measurably increase the number of beneficiaries who find and hold down a job. States had to show their plans would move at least 20 percent more people into work. Ron Haskins, a Republican aide who helped write the 1996 law, said: There's no plausible scenario under which it really constitutes a serious attack on welfare reform. Clinton himself called the claim not true. The policy argument behind the ad was not invented from nothing. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation argued on 12 July 2012, under the headline "Obama Guts Welfare Reform," that the waivers could let state officials count activities that are not really work. That is a fair worry to raise about any waiver. It is not the same as saying people would get a check without working or training, and the ad said the second thing. On "Understands": the Post Fact Checker gave it Four Pinocchios, with Glenn Kessler writing: On every level, this ad stretches the bounds of common sense and decency. Glenn Kessler, Washington Post Fact Checker, 7 August 2012, as recorded on the FRAME case study. FactCheck.org called it misleading on several counts. The gaps were dates. Bain bought GST Steel in 1993; the company went bankrupt and the mill closed in 2001, costing more than 750 jobs. Romney had already left Bain to run the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. Ranae Soptic had her own employer coverage until an injury in 2002 or 2003. She was diagnosed and died in 2006. "A short time after that" covered about five years. Soptic was a real witness to his own job loss and his wife's death. The ad used that standing to carry a claim about Romney's responsibility that it gave viewers no way to check. ## Who made them, and how each side answered The two ads were not equal in sponsorship or reach, and an honest account says so. "Right Choice" and its sequels were the candidate's own ads, carrying the candidate's approval, in heavy rotation, and reported to take a large share of the campaign's August ad budget. The campaign kept running and expanding them after the verdicts. Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said Mitt Romney has consistently supported strong work requirements for welfare recipients. At a Republican convention panel on 28 August, pollster Neil Newhouse said we're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers. In 2016 he said he had meant that ads were fact-checked internally. Asked about a 2005 letter in which Romney and other Republican governors had sought more waiver authority, the campaign said they had been talking about flexibility, not changing work requirements. "Understands" came from a super PAC, which by law may not coordinate with a campaign. CBS reported it as part of a $20 million effort on Romney's business record, but the ad itself ran mainly online. Priorities USA said it aired on television once, in Cleveland, by a station's error. Its chief, Bill Burton, said on CNN that the group was not blaming Romney for the death: We would never make that case. The Obama campaign said it had no connection to the ad. Deputy manager Stephanie Cutter told CNN on 8 August she did not know the facts of the Soptic case, although she had hosted a May campaign conference call on which Soptic told his story, and Soptic had appeared in a two-minute Obama campaign ad about GST Steel that ran for one day that May. David Axelrod said on 12 August that the ad had not been on the air. So the welfare ad was the bigger buy and the more stubborn defense. The Soptic ad was the more personal charge, with the smaller paid audience and a campaign that had used the same man's story months earlier and then said it did not know the details. ## The racial-coding charge Some critics said the welfare ads carried a racial message. Princeton's Tali Mendelberg said they were implicitly doing so. Michael Tesler's YouGov experiment found the ad did not shift overall answers, but that among those who saw it, racial resentment became a stronger predictor of views on whether Romney would help various groups. Rachel Maddow called it a dog whistle. Newt Gingrich, arguing the welfare case for the campaign, called charges of race-baiting absurd, and an aide said the charge did not deserve a response. The experiment measures an effect on viewers, not the campaign's intent. Intent is not shown. Falsity about the policy is. ## Protected speech, corrected by private checkers Both ads were protected speech. Neither should have been pulled by a regulator, and neither was. The correction came from private fact-checkers, reporters, and opposing campaigns, which is the system the First Amendment assumes. That system has a limit: it can rate an ad, but it cannot make a sponsor stop. Newhouse's line said out loud what both camps showed in practice. One kept airing a claim rated false. The other let an ad it disowned do its work through news coverage while its surrogates said it was barely running. There is a separate point a skeptic of executive power should note. The welfare waiver was an agency memo, not a statute, and its scope was argued over in exactly the way that happens when an executive department reads new flexibility into an old law. Asking whether HHS could waive the 1996 work rules by memo was a legitimate question. The ad answered it with a claim that was not true. ## Its legacy The welfare dispute ended quietly. Only Ohio applied for a work-requirement waiver under the 2012 memo, in 2015 and 2017, and that application was denied. HHS rescinded the memo in 2017. No waiver of the kind the ads described was ever granted. The steelworker ad left a narrower lesson: put a date on every link in a story of cause and effect. The same split between a campaign's own ad and an outside group's harsher one appeared in 1988, covered on this site in the furlough and Byrd ads, and in 2004 in the service-record ads. ## Sources - FRAME case study "The steelworker ad and the welfare ads: two fact-checked attacks from the 2012 U.S. presidential race," for the chronology, ad texts, ratings, sponsor responses, and the 2017 rescission. - Washington Post Fact Checker, 7 August 2012: New anti-Romney ad; FactCheck.org: Is Romney to Blame for Cancer Death? - PolitiFact, 7 August 2012: the welfare ad; FactCheck.org: Does Obama's Plan 'Gut Welfare Reform'?; CNN, 23 August 2012: Romney's welfare claims wrong. - Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector, 12 July 2012: Obama Guts Welfare Reform. - ABC News: Stephanie Cutter and the Soptic conference call; The Hill: Axelrod on the Priorities ad. - ABC News: Romney pollster on fact-checkers. - YouGov (Michael Tesler): Testing the racializing influence of Romney's welfare ad. - Congressional Research Service, TANF: Welfare Waivers (R42627); Administration for Children and Families: Work Requirements Restored for TANF (2017). Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/case-studies/us-2012-steelworker-and-welfare-ads/