It is what you think it is
The American political system is bipolar in much the same way that the world during the Cold War era was bipolar: there are two sides, diametrically opposed, that have become so powerful in their respective spheres of influence that they have managed to squeeze out any viable alternative to their competing systems. Everyone is forced to choose a side, regardless of how closely they hew to the ideology espoused by their patron; the distinctions are relatively broad (and as a result, somewhat imprecise) - liberal vs. conservative, capitalist vs. communist. Ultimately, it's a zero-sum game: a victory for one side equates to a corresponding defeat for the other. With such stakes, it is unsurprising that, as technological advances have improved the rhetorical and military arsenals available to America's political parties and the superpowers respectively, both of their competitions assumed an increasingly annihilationist cast.
In such an environment, the material and strategic value of actors and events tends to be distorted or superseded by their perceived political value: thus do Vietnam and Afghanistan, both relatively obscure nations devoid of significant resources, become vital areas of national interest for the United States and the Soviet Union respectively, worth thousands of soldiers' lives and billions of dollars. So to it is in our current political environment, where something as seemingly trivial as Hillary Clinton's laugh* can become fodder for serious debate and discussion on our news networks, in publications of note (hi dere Hendrik Hertzberg!), and across the vast expanses of the internet. For a nation that occasionally collectively professes to not have much use for the French, we are quickly adopting one of their most annoying habits: the tendency to see a quantifiable political dimension in every gesture, no matter how seemingly innocuous.
Into this no-holds-barred arena unwittingly strode Graeme Frost, aged 12, and his family. Young Graeme, disabled in a car accident when the family SUV struck a patch of black ice, delivered the Democratic radio address last week, urging President Bush to reconsider his veto of legislation expanding the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a program funded by the federal government and administered by the individual states (it is often referred to as SCHIP for that reason) that provides health care coverage to children whose families earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford private insurance. "Most kids my age probably haven't heard of CHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Program," said Graeme. "But I know all about it, because if it weren't for CHIP, I might not be here today."
It must be said that CHIP is not a particularly controversial program; while it was a Democratic initiative to increase its funding by $7 billion dollars annually, many Republicans, including my dipshit congressman, voted for the measure - the bills passed 68-31 and 225-204 in the Senate and House respectively. President Bush vetoed it because, after six and half years of pissing trillions of dollars away on tax cuts for the wealthy and the war in Iraq (not to mention his politically motivated trillion dollar Medicare perscription drug coverage boondoggle), he decided that the best way regain the mantle of fiscal conservatism was to screw children out of health insurance.
As you might have gathered, CHIP is also politically popular: Americans, though generally suspicious of "socialized healthcare", tend to approve of government assistance when the recipients are vulnerable populations such as the elderly, the disabled, or children. The Democrats, sensing that they had public opinion on their side, set about hammering the President on the issue, both for political gain, and in order get Bush to rescind his veto. Hardcore conservatives, who a) generally have the President's back, b) hate liberals, and c) believe that every political fight is a do-or-die contest of wills with grave strategic implications in the ongoing war for the hearts and minds of right-thinking Americans, promptly set about casting CHIP as a villainous scheme to slip "socialized medicine" in through the back door, and in the process, destabilize the system of free enterprise that has made this country great, presumably so it can be replaced by, uh, Marxism-Leninism.
Now, I don't know about the political philosophy of Graeme Frost or his family. They may in fact be dyed in the wool Democrats who hang portraits of Nancy Pelosi around the house, named the family mastiffs Bill and Hillary, and regularly tithe to MoveOn.org. I suspect, however, that they agreed to participate in the Democrats' radio address because they think that CHIP, a federal program that has immensely benefited them, is generally a good thing that should be available to more families who find themselves in similar circumstances. In other words, they're not concerned how this debate plays out politically in Ohio or Florida next year; they just know that CHIP may be the reason that their children (Graeme's sister suffered a serious brain injury in the same accident) are still alive.
Of course, the Frosts got "swift-boated." In an article for Time, Karen Tumulty, recounts the process whereby members the conservative blogosphere smeared Graeme's family, using incomplete information available on the internet to assault their credibility:
It started over the weekend, when a blogger calling himself Icwhatudo put up a post on the conservative website Freerepublic.com noting what he had found by scavenging around the internet: that Graeme attends a private school, lives in a remodeled house near one that had sold for $485,000 in March and is the child of parents whose wedding was announced in the New York Times. The post also noted that his father purchased a $160,000 commercial space in 1999."One has to wonder that if time and money can be found to remodel a home, send kids to exclusive private schools, purchase commercial property and run your own business... maybe money can be found for other things," the blogger wrote. "Maybe Dad should drop his woodworking hobby and get a real job that offers health insurance rather than making people like me (also with 4 kids in a 600sf smaller house and tuition $16,000 less per kid and no commercial property ownership) pay for it in my taxes."
According to Tumulty's account, the rhetoric intensified from there:
Typical of the tone was what Mark Steyn wrote on National Review Online: "Bad things happen to good people, and they cause financial problems and tough choices. But, if this is the face of the 'needy' in America, then no one is not needy." Nameless commenters to conservative blogs were even harsher. "Let 'em twist in the wind and be eaten by ravens," wrote one one on Redstate.com, who was quoted in the Baltimore Sun. "Then maybe the bunch of socialist patsies will think twice.""Ah, but is it true?" you ask. "Is the federal government lavishing my hard-earned tax dollars on a perfectly well-to-do dilettante woodworker and his burgher household when they can well afford to pay for their own health insurance?" Well, no:
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.As Tumulty succinctly puts it, "the Frosts are precisely the kind of people that the SCHIP program was intended to help."
I suppose it would be naive of me to express shock, or even disappointment, at the sight of (presumably) grown men casting anonymous aspersions about a disabled 12 year-old boy and his family from the safety of the internet. After all, the Frosts did have the temerity to publicly associate their message with the Democratic Party - the same party that voted to expand CHIP coverage in the first place. Perhaps in another era, such a benign activity - "civic engagement", I think they used to call it, even in a partisan setting - might not have earned them the same enmity and vituperation. Or perhaps the disgust was alway there, and the internet has just allowed people to voice it in a convenient, expedient fashion.
Either way, it's immaterial. The game is a game no longer; games have rules, and it becomes clearer and clearer by the moment that whatever rules of civility and decorum that may have bound our political processes have been progressively stripped away as America's lurid appetite for bile has increased. The real question is when the corrosiveness of the political process will begin to seriously undermine our ability to govern and be governed harmoniously; what happens to the social contract when we become so convinced of our opponents' perfidy that we feel that we no longer have a moral obligation to adhere to the bargain when they are in power? Granted, I am being alarmist; I suspect that the Republic won't be toppled by rudeness anytime soon. But it is an intriguing scenario, one brought just a little bit closer to fruition when we can't even bring ourselves to be polite to a 7th grader.
*That's right, I compared Hillary Clinton's laugh to Vietnam.
