The mainstream news media has been edging into covering the Graeme Frost controversy bit by bit – and today Time Magazine has come out and flatly said it: 12-year-old Graeme Frost was “swiftboated.”
And, indeed, welcome to the 21st century where politics seems to revolve around targeting those who disagree with you and working hard to slap negative labels on them so their actual debating points on policy are seemingly forgotten, or you try to put them on the defensive. (We just got an email from a reader who insisted this site is only running one take on this subject. This is typical of the approach. He somehow forgot to mention THIS POST we ran that criticized the analyses of several writers on this site. He also apparently forgot the links here to posts and articles of sites who don’t agree with us.).
Time’s Karen Tumulty writes:
If you listen closely to the two-minute radio address that 12-year-old Graeme Frost delivered last week for the Democrats, you can hear the lingering effects of the 2004 car crash that put him into a coma for a week and left one of his vocal chords paralyzed. “Most kids my age probably haven’t heard of CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program,” he says in a voice that sounds weak and stressed. “But I know all about it, because if it weren’t for CHIP, I might not be here today.”
Graeme, whose sister suffered worse brain injuries when their family SUV hit a patch of black ice, was making an appeal for President Bush to reconsider his veto of legislation that would have expanded the program designed to provide health coverage to children of the working poor — those who are too rich to qualify for Medicaid, but unable to afford private insurance.
That made it clear that he would be a formidable poster boy for Mr. Bush’s veto. So, in retrospect, what followed is not surprising given the depths to which American politics has sunk:
Since then, Frost and his family have been introduced first-hand to something else that most kids his age haven’t: the reality of how brutal partisan politics can be in the Internet age.
Time then recounts some of the details about the charges made about the kid and his family. And the (still ongoing) efforts to neutralize them as is now the custom in American politics (you don’t debate the ideas and the policies you try to discredit the person who dares outline the ideas and differs with the policy and you can reap enormous personal popularity from that since conflict and rage sells and policy discussion and debate is to so some boooring and so oh so 20th century).
But, Tumulty notes, there is a bit of a hitch with what those who’ve gone after Frost and his family have contended:
It turns out, however, that not everything about the Frosts’ life pops up on a Google search. While Graeme does attend a private school, he does so on scholarship. Halsey Frost is a self-employed woodworker; he and his wife say they earn between $45,000 and $50,000 a year to provide for their family of six. Their 1936 rowhouse was purchased in 1990 for $55,000. It was vacant and in a run-down neighborhood that has improved since then, in part because of people like themselves who took a chance. It is now assessed at $263,140, though under state law the value of that asset is not taken into account in determining their eligibility for SCHIP. And while they are still uninsured, they claim it is most certainly not by choice. Bonnie Frost says the last time she priced health coverage, she learned it would cost them $1,200 a month.
In short, just as the radio spot claimed, the Frosts are precisely the kind of people that the SCHIP program was intended to help.
But now, according to Time, the critics who’ve gone after Frost and his family to in one sense have indeed “won.”
After giving a few interviews, Halsey and Bonnie Frost now say they don’t want to say anything more, though network camera crews have planted themselves in front of their house.
Halsey did have this to say in an e-mail to me:
“My son Graeme has helped put on a human face, that of a young boy, representing the needs of children and families across this nation. We are a hard working family that has stepped forward to support SCHIP. Mudslinging from the fringe has now been directed at the messenger. To be smeared all over the Internet and receive nasty e-mail — my family does not deserve this retribution. It is both shameful and pathetic.
“Driven by a most dubious agenda, shortsighted cut-and-paste bloggers, lacking all the facts, have made a feeble attempt at being crack reporters. This is an aberrant attempt to distract the American people from what the real issues are. Hard working American families need affordable health insurance.
“I find it morally reprehensible, and the act of a true coward, to publicly (world wide) smear a man and his family and not sign one’s own real name to what they have written. I sign my name to what I write.
Many Americans — including some non-lockstep Republicans who DO believe in debating on issues and not destroying those who dare stand up to a policy or a President will likely say “ditto” to that.
And Time’s writer ends with this:
Politics has never been a gentle game. As far back as 1895, satirist Finley Peter Dunne’s fictional saloonkeeper Martin Dooley observed that women, children and prohibitionists would do well to stay out of it, because “politics ain’t beanbag.” But surely, even Mr. Dooley could never have imagined a day would come when a mere seventh grader could be swift-boated.
Ditto…
A CROSS SECTION OF OTHER VIEWS:
—Townhall: SCHIP, Graeme Frost, and the Bloggers
—The Frosts Demonstrate Why We Need Single Payer Health Care
—Conservatives Slam 12-year-old
—Newsbusters: Baltimore Sun Smears Conservative Bloggers Over SCHIP Scrutiny
—The Heretik (who always proves a picture is worth a thousand words)
—John Cole
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.