“Tough on Kids; Weak on Work.” That was Bill Clinton’s regular and emphatic judgment on the Republican attitude on welfare reform as he vetoed two congressional GOP bills before cutting the deal that became the landmark 1996 law.

This was no mere rhetoric. As a welfare policy wonk in the 1990s I can attest to the fact that Republican interest in welfare reform was focused on everything other than work: punishing illegitimacy, creating absolute time limits for eligibility, devolving responsibility for the indigent to the states, and saving money for the federal government. If work requirements helped meet these goals, Republicans were supportive, but it was hardly their main interest, particularly if it required “making work pay” for welfare recipients via support for the working poor.

That’s one of several reasons the new Mitt Romney campaign ad attacking Barack Obama for an alleged “gutting” of the 1996 law by “dropping work requirements” is so mendacious and hypocritical.

The most immediate outrage is that the ad’s central claim is, to use a technical term, a lie. The Obama administration has not changed the architecture of the 1996 welfare reform law at all. What it has done, as a response to repeated requests by governors from both parties for flexibility in administering the law—a demand Republicans, including Mitt Romney, have been making from practically the moment it was signed—is to say it was open to offering waivers that exclude states from precisely those regulations that inhibit rather than encourage placing welfare recipients in jobs.

The July 12 memo from HHS Office of Family Assistance Director Earl Johnson which announced the waiver policy is reasonably clear about what the agency will and will not consider: