CHIP On Their Shoulder

On the left, commentators are really ticked off over what they view as the smearing of a 12-year-old boy.

On the right, pundits say they are raising legitimate questions about a family that the Democrats trotted out as a symbol of the child health insurance program.

The House, as expected, failed to override Bush's veto of a $35-billion expansion of the program yesterday. But the real emotion seems to surround Graeme Frost, the brain-damaged boy who delivered the Democratic radio address about the S-CHIP program.

You will not be surprised to learn that I am not in favor of beating up on young kids. But I also don't think it's unfair for opponents to question a family's income qualifications for a federal program after the other side has put the family forward as a symbol of why the program is needed.

The problem is that some of the early attacks on the Frost family (the parents have already chatted with Keith Olbermann) were misleading. Yes, the kid goes to a private school, but on scholarship. Yes, the father owns a home, but he bought it in 1990, in a rundown neighborhood, for $55,000.

There's no question that Democrats are winning the PR war, with polls showing that eight in 10 Americans support an expansion of the program. But some of the media coverage may have created the impression that the president wants to kick kids off the program, when he is opposing adding nearly 4 million more kids to the current roster of 6.6 million covered.

The story has taken another strange twist with the Senate's top Republican getting caught in an apparent untruth. S-CHIPgate doesn't have a great ring to it, but check out this Louisville Courier-Journal piece:

"Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell not valid. knew last week -- at a time when he was denying it -- that his staff had sent e-mails encouraging reporters to look into the background of a 12-year-old boy used by Democrats to support expansion of a health-care program.

"In an interview Friday with WHAS-TV reporter Mark Hebert, the Kentucky Republican said his staff had not been involved in trying to push reporters to look into the financial situation of the boy's family.

"But McConnell's communications director, Don Stewart, said in an interview Monday with The Courier-Journal that he had told McConnell about the Oct. 8 e-mails sometime around Thursday, the day before the interview with Hebert.

"Stewart also said, however, that he had told the senator he had sent follow-up e-mails within a matter of hours warning reporters off of the story because 'the family is legit.' "

At TPM, Greg Sargent wonders why this isn't a bigger deal: