I smell desperation.

It’s one thing when campaign supporters and even surrogates issue scurrilous attacks on their candidate’s opponent— both sides have done some of this — but it’s another thing altogether when those accusations become a central line of attack stemming from the candidate himself.

Earlier this week, Mitt Romney claimed that President Obama had moved to eliminate the work requirement for welfare recipients.

Romney pushed the point in an ad with the narrator saying:

On July 12, 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, and ‘welfare to work’ goes back to being plain old welfare.

In person, Romney has repeated this claim over and over.

The only problem is that it’s not true. In fact, that assertion is misleading in myriad ways.

Never mind that waivers from aspects of the federal welfare program were requested by the Republican governors of Nevada and Utah.

Never mind that, as Talking Points Memo pointed out Tuesday: “In 2005, Romney and 28 other Republican governors wrote a letter to Congress requesting even more flexibility than Obama has offered, for the purpose of ‘[e]mpowering states to seek new and innovative solutions to help welfare recipients achieve independence.’”

Never mind that “as governor, Romney offered welfare recipients free auto insurance, registration, inspections and memberships in AAA, ” as Joe Klein noted, also on Tuesday.

Setting all that aside, the memo in question bore little relation to Romney’s provocative claims. It said, in part, that the Department of Health and Human Services:

is issuing this information memorandum to notify states of the Secretary’s willingness to exercise her waiver authority under section 1115 of the Social Security Act to allow states to test alternative and innovative strategies, policies, and procedures that are designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families.

The memo continued:

The Secretary is interested in using her authority to approve waiver demonstrations to challenge states to engage in a new round of innovation that seeks to find more effective mechanisms for helping families succeed in employment. In providing for these demonstrations, H.H.S. will hold states accountable by requiring both a federally-approved evaluation and interim performance targets that ensure an immediate focus on measurable outcomes.

Furthermore:

States that fail to meet interim outcome targets will be required to develop an improvement plan and can face termination of the waiver project.

That’s right, the Department of Health and Human Services was granting flexibility to states because it wanted to improve employment outcomes and H.H.S. promised to terminate the waiver if states didn’t meet the targets.

It is no wonder, then, that PolitiFact said of Romney’s ad:

The ad’s claim is not accurate, and it inflames old resentments about able-bodied adults sitting around collecting public assistance. Pants on Fire!

“Pants on Fire” is PolitiFact’s worst rating.

And the welfare claim comes on the heels of Romney accusing the president of filing a lawsuit “claiming it is unconstitutional for Ohio to allow servicemen and women extended early voting privileges during the state’s early voting period.” In reality, as Factcheck.org pointed out, “the Democratic lawsuit seeks to restore early voting ‘for all Ohio voters,’ ” because “Ohio’s GOP-controlled Legislature in 2011 limited early voting for nonmilitary residents.” Politifact said that what voters got from the Romney campaign “is a falsehood.” In other words, a lie.

What could push a man to hang his hat on so sharp a nail? Fear, that’s what.

As we move into the conventions, the Republican candidate is still down in the polls — two recent surveys have deplorable favorability numbers for Romney. At this point, according to my colleague Nate Silver’s blog, FiveThirtyEight, Obama is favored to win in November.

Romney has to find a line of attack that works because there is a creeping feeling beginning to overtake part of the electorate that his candidacy is in trouble. The problem is that these sorts of desperate, baseless attacks only amplify the sense of panic.