On August 7, Mitt Romney did not slam Barack Obama for presiding over a welfare system which leaves the poor to sell their blood. Barack Obama did not skewer Mitt Romney for touting a post-reform status quo that drives women back to their abusers. Instead, the president and his Republican challenger accused each other of coddling the poor.

In the hours after the Romney camp debuted an ad hitting Obama on welfare reform, liberal commentators made a few important points: The ad’s allegation — that Obama had gutted “welfare reform” — was false, and undeserving of “he said, she said.” Romney’s position — that state waivers betrayed the law — clashed with his prior stance as Governor. And Romney’s message appealed to the same resentments that infused and instigated the nineties welfare debates.

What’s gone nearly unnoticed is the zeal with which the Obama campaign stoked the same resentments in its pushback. A campaign statement charged that Romney “petitioned the federal government for waivers that would have let people stay on welfare for an indefinite period, ending welfare reform as we know it, and even created a program that handed out free cars to welfare recipients.” Only Obama can protect us from a Republican regime of hand-outs and Oprah-style free cars for the undeserving poor.