CHIP On Their Shoulder

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 19, 2007 8:09 AM

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:

"When are the cable nets and the Capitol Hill press and the pundits going to dig into the role that GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell played in pushing the smear of the Frost family?

"It needs to be said that reporters like Time's Karen Tumulty and The New York Times's David Herszenhorn did a decent job knocking down the original winger smear of the Frosts. But since then, the story's moved forward considerably, and it's gotten really good. And neither these media worthies nor any others have followed suit . . .

"It's key to keep in mind that this isn't just some GOP City Councilman from Nowheresville. It's the GOP leader in the Senate. His office tried to get reporters to join Michelle Malkin and the rest of the wingnut hounds to join in the chase of a 12-year-old boy who'd been severely injured. McConnell knew about this, and then lied about knowing about it.

"I know, the 'let's imagine if a Dem had done this' game is a cliche. But let's play it anyway. Imagine if a top communications staffer for Harry Reid tried to get mainstream reporters to follow the lead of lefty bloggers who were digging into the background of, and harassing, a young boy who had appeared in a GOP ad for some policy initiative or another -- and then imagine if Reid were caught lying about it."

Digby sees the process as business as usual for the Beltway press corps:

"Journalists will say that using political 'oppo research' is a legitimate way to get tips, as long as they always check them out before they run with them. Fair enough. But what they fail to acknowledge is that this allows the best story-planters to set the agenda for coverage, and the best story-planters are those who know how to get the media interested.

"And after watching them for the past two decades very closely, I think it's obvious that what interests the media more than anything is access and gossip and vicious little smears piled one atop the other. And why not? They are easy to report, require no mind numbing shuffling of financial reports or struggling through arcane policy papers. In fact, the press has made a virtue of the simple-mindedness by calling what used to be known as gossip, 'character issues', which are used to stand in for judgment about policy.

"The press, therefore, will go to great lengths to protect the people who give them what they crave, most of whom happen to be Republicans since character smears are their very special talent. There was a reason why Rove and Libby used 'the wife sent him on a boondoggle' line. Stories about Edwards and his hair and Hillary and her cold, calculating cleavage are the coin of the realm.Why we see so little of the same kind of feeding frenzies on the other side isn't hard to fathom. Nobody is spoon-feeding them to the press with just the kind of cutesy meanness they prefer."

I agree that leakers often get to set the story line, but I also know that Democrats are not unfamiliar with the practice. (Remember the Bush DUI leak just before the 2000 election?) And those who leaked information about domestic surveillance, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons also had an impact.

As for the veto override, which fell 13 votes short:

"This time," says the L.A. Times, "House Republicans resisted a two-week publicity blitz in favor of the children's legislation by groups ranging from major labor unions to the American Medical Assn. Many GOP lawmakers echoed Bush's concern that the bill would go too far in giving states the option to also help some middle-class families.

"Though the president and his senior advisors have pledged to negotiate with Congress to extend the program and avoid any breaks in coverage, it's unclear if they will be able to strike a deal."

"For now," says the New York Times, "the insurance vote stands as the latest example of how Mr. Bush can still get his way on Capitol Hill. Through artful use of veto threats and his veto pen, Mr. Bush has fended off attempts to force a change of course in Iraq -- a feat Democrats would never have imagined when they pushed Republicans out of power a year ago. He has twisted Democrats into knots over domestic surveillance, and forced them to rethink a resolution condemning as genocide a century-old massacre of Armenians."

National Review backs the president:

"We're glad the House voted to sustain Bush's veto of the bill to expand S-CHIP, the children's health-insurance program. We think Bush is right on policy grounds, and that Republicans are in a better political position than a lot of people think.

"The problem with the bill is not, primarily, that it represents 'middle-class welfare.' . . . Its design guarantees that it will transfer money from poor states to rich ones, and from poor people to middle-class ones . . .

"We understand why S-CHIP makes Republicans nervous. Nobody wants to be labeled as hostile to children. But over the next year the issue will inevitably take a back seat to the parties' approaches toward health care in general."

And in a related development: "Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that immigrants living in the U.S. illegally would not be covered by her proposed universal health care plan."

Does Sam Brownback dropping out today mean much? Let's defer to David Yepsen at the Des Moines Register:

"The likely beneficiary of his departure in Iowa will be Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

"Prior to the August straw poll, the two were fighting a pitched battle for the support of Iowa's most activist social conservatives. Their test was the Ames straw poll and Huckabee came up the winner.

"Brownback appeared to be better organized and was campaigning more heavily in the state, but Huckabee trumped him by attracting new Republicans who support replacing the income tax with a national sales tax."

The New Republic's Noam Scheiber was already high on Huck, especially after a Rasmussen poll in Iowa showed Romney with 25 percent, Thompson with 19, Huckabee with 18 and Rudy with 13.

"'ve said it before and I'll say it again: Mike Huckabee could easily take second place in the caucuses. That's my prediction in any case . . .

"Huckabee is all about grassroots organization, which he more or less has to be given how little money he's raised. But that's what it takes to do well in Iowa."

A national poll by CBS has Rudy at 29, Thompson at 21, McCain at 18 and Romney at 12. Tell me again why the media take Romney so much more seriously than McCain? I guess it's because the senator has no money and is nowhere in Iowa.

It's hard to believe that Democratic Rep. Pete Stark said this, as Red State reports:

" But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president's amusement.

"Democrats have no problem using troops or kids to advance their political goals in Washington. There should be an OUTRAGE...and this piece of human bile should be called out for it by every American who, like me, is ABSOLUTELY not amused."

You might think this is a tough season for Republicans--Denny Hastert isn't even sticking around until the end of his term--but the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes sees glimmers of hope:

"The political direction in Washington is shifting. The White House, in a defensive crouch for much of 2007, is beginning to go on offense. The Democratic Congress is increasingly on defense. If this trend continues, the dreary prospects for Republicans in the 2008 election may improve.

"Look what's happened this fall. Democrats have abandoned their bid to end the war in Iraq or even to put limits on President Bush's policy of adding troops and pursuing a counterinsurgency strategy there. Meanwhile, the surge policy is unquestionably working.

"And while the White House is on the defensive in opposing the expansion of the S-chip program of health insurance for poor kids, the president now has an agenda of his own to pursue. This puts him on offense, tentatively anyway. The agenda consists of trade bills, fresh authorization of electronic surveillance of terrorists, confirmation of a new attorney general, and a serious effort to curb spending.

"Democrats, in contrast, have some defending to do. They must justify tax increases on energy production and tobacco, plus whatever tax hikes they propose to replace the alternative minimum tax (AMT). Democrats will also be forced to defend restrictions on surveillance of terrorists in foreign countries whose calls are routed through the United States, and explain their grounds for reneging on a pledge to support trade bills that impose labor and environmental standards."

Is McCain back in this thing? Joe Klein shows his soft spot:

"I am not suggesting that John McCain is a plausible front runner for the Republican nomination. Republicans tend not to like people like McCain: too wild, too willing to work with Senators like Ted Kennedy (gasp!) and Russ Feingold (gulp!) on legislation. Then again, what are the options? There is no plausible front runner. Each of the Republicans is flawed and flailing. The despair and hilarity as the various candidates try to squeeze into the conservative base's straitjacket, like the stepsisters struggling to fit into Cinderella's slipper, have been the gaudiest political show of 2007 . . .

"He is not a likely nominee because many Republicans, of all stripes, tend to believe he 'ran against the party' in 2000, as a prominent Republican told me. Indeed, McCain won the New Hampshire and Michigan contests with the help of Democrats and Independents who crossed over to support him. Those votes won't be so available this time. But it is wonderful to have McCain, the old suicidal, masochistic McCain, back roiling the waters."

Liberal bloggers aren't wild about the House-passed journalists' shield law, which limits protection to those who earn a significant portion of their income from reporting. Says Atrios:

"I don't really like any shield law which attempts to define journalism as a class rather than an act, I don't like that such law uses an income test to define that class, and I certainly don't understand why the emphasis is on protecting the journalists from testifying rather than the whistleblowers who need protecting."

But there already is a whistleblower protection law.

Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum sees it as half a loaf:

"I agree that defining 'journalist' as someone who makes a sufficient amount of money doing journalism is a lousy idea. This was almost certainly done as a way to prevent abuse (i.e., mob figures starting up blogs and then claiming they don't have to testify in court because they disseminate information), but it's a dumb way of addressing the problem. There are perfectly good ways of defining the activity of journalism, and judges are perfectly capable of then making common sense rulings about someone's bona fides. They do it all the time.

"But I disagree on the whistleblower thing . . . When reporters get leaks from anonymous sources, those sources don't want to know that they'll be 'protected.' They want to know that they won't be revealed. Period. Nothing else even comes close to providing the security they need against an administration ( anyone's administration) that will do whatever it can to ruin their career, law or no law."

Finally, on the coziness watch, this news from the Boston Globe:

"The editor of the Lowell Sun, which last December published a special section in tribute to Martin T. Meehan under a controversial arrangement between the newspaper and Meehan's staff, has purchased Meehan's house."

And here's the eye-opener: Editor Jim Campanini bought the former congressman's 3,000-square-foot house for $585,000 (a bit below the assessed value). Trying finding that kind of space in D.C. for a half-mil!