I hear that in a discussion of the SCHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program) program, Gilmore called children's health care "welfare." Yeah, must be that "compassionate conservativism" expressing itself once again. (***snark***)
P.S. Actually, courtesy of Wikipedia:
The State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) is a United States federal government program that gives funds to states in order to provide health insurance to families with children. The program was designed to cover uninsured children in families with incomes that are modest but too high to qualify for Medicaid.[...]
States are given flexibility in designing their SCHIP eligibility requirements and policies within broad federal guidelines. Some states have received authority through waivers of statutory provisions to use SCHIP funds to cover the parents of children receiving benefits from both SCHIP and Medicaid, pregnant women, and other adults. SCHIP covered 6.6 million children and 670,000 adults at some point during Federal fiscal year 2006, and every state has an approved plan....
That's what Gilmore calls "welfare." As opposed to the huge amounts of CORPORATE welfare to Big Oil, etc., that Gilmore and the Republicans love so much.
What part of this definition doesn't SCHIP meet? It's aid, provided by the government, to people in need.
Seriously. Attack him on something substantive.
SCHIP is welfare, in my opinion one of the classes of welfare that should be supported*. But to attack him for calling SCHIP "welfare" is dumb, because that's what it is.
Maybe you should attack him instead for treating "welfare" like it's a dirty word.
*The biggest reason being that I believe that children shouldn't have a terrible life just because their parents aren't doing well. This goes for well-funded educational systems as well. It's one thing to expect unmarried able-bodied people to provide for themselves through hard work, but it's harder to argue that children should pull themselves up by their parents' bootstraps.
So, yeah, that was my entire point, Republicans like Gilmore attack any government assistance, no matter how beneficial or worthwhile, as "welfare" ("dog whistle" allusion to poor black people, of course) and act as if that's a "dirty word" as you say.