New Obama, Romney ads: Education and welfare

(CBS News) Picking apart Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan's budget, the Obama campaign has found a new issue on which to attack him: Education. His campaign released a new television advertisement Wednesday saying the Ryan plan would "cut education by 20 percent."

In the new ad titled "Children," a couple says smaller class sizes have lead to their children's "greatest experiences" in school.

"But Mitt Romney says class sizes don't matter," a narrator intones. "And he supports Paul Ryan's budget which could cut education by 20 percent." The ad credits the liberal leaning Center for Budget and Policy Priorities for the statistic.

Ryan's budget, which Republicans used as their blueprint for fiscal policy, has now become a central point of debate in the presidential campaign since he was chosen as Romney's vice presidential candidate. The president took the issue of education on the campaign trail to Nevada and Ohio this week.

Previously, the Obama campaign went after Ryan's Medicare proposal, which would move Medicare from a fee-for-service government program to a voucher system.

The Romney campaign, meanwhile, is continuing its attacks on the president over welfare, specifically his July executive order that allows states waivers on work requirements.

The latest television advertisement has video footage of President Bill Clinton after signing welfare reform in 1996, which instituted a work requirement for welfare recipients.

"This bill will help people stop drawing a welfare check and start drawing a paycheck," Mr. Clinton says in the video footage.

The ad then goes on to show footage of President Obama in 1998 saying, "I was not a supporter of the federal plan that was signed in 1996."

The ad builds on previous advertisementsthat charged that Mr. Obama gutted the work requirements in welfare reform, a claim numerous independent analysts have said is wrong as the Obama administration insists that states are not allowed to weaken work requirements. This ad avoids that claim but implies that the president opposes work requirements.