Thread by @BenjySarlin

I wrote a little about how Mitt Romney's child allowance is part of a broader trend. With both the Trump-era right and D's of all stripes pitching voters on direct cash benefits, the GOP doesn't have much of a working vocabulary to oppose them nbcnews.com/politics/meet-…

Ironically, Romney's own famous "47%" remarks were about how conservatives don't like "lucky duckies" with no income tax bill because they get too many refundable credits. Trump proposed sending them a tax return that said "I WIN" instead. That was the end of that.

Similarly, Trump has popularized the idea that just about everyone should get $2,000 checks. But that also makes it harder to attack monthly checks without work requirements as anti-work "welfare," which Rubio and Lee have argued.

The irony here is thick too. As @ArthurDelaneyHP notes, Romney falsely accused Obama of ending work requirements for welfare -- probably the dirtiest attack of his campaign. He's now taking the straw man he ran against and essentially demanding it be law.

https://twitter.com/ArthurDelaneyHP/status/1357349137893711873

But Romney's journey also shows how the party has moved. There's more room for social conservatives, in particular, to make the case that more benefits for the Trump-era working class base will help them form and maintain stable families. They haven't won, but debate is louder.

“It makes me very uncomfortable when these kinds of proposals are being discussed so freely without a lot of pushback," @AngelaRachidi, an AEI scholar who has argued Romney/Biden proposals will discourage work, told me.

But the largest share of the electorate are millennials, and Gen Z is right behind. Most of us have no memory of Reagan at all, and at best minimal recall of Clinton's welfare reform bill. If GOP want to push back, they have to find a way to re-teach their voters these concepts.