One of the issues in the California governor’s race is driving some commentators and policy analysts to distraction: welfare reform. Always quick to look for code words and conspiracies underneath ideas and arguments they don’t like, the Left seems unwilling to look at the basic facts of the matter:

GOP candidate Steve Poizner, the state’s insurance commissioner, first raised the issue in October, declaring that welfare should be a “transitional assistance program, not a permanent way of life.” And last month Poizner’s opponent, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, made welfare reform the subject of her first ad focusing on a single policy issue.
In the radio spot, Whitman picked up on a statistic also used by Poizner: California is home to 12 percent of the nation’s people but more than 30 percent of its welfare recipients.

Apologists for the status quo argue that California, like other states, implemented welfare reform more than a decade ago and saw cash-assistance rolls drop by half. Yes — but most states were able to reduce their welfare caseloads to a greater extent by developing and enforcing better rules. California has led the nation only in replacing dependency on cash welfare with dependency on other forms of welfare that never really got reformed in the first place, which is one factor driving its state budget off a cliff.