Out of the mouths of partisan babes


What did you think of that story on the cover of the Times this week where Grace Mosier, age 6, of Topeka, Kansas, waxed highly enthusiastic about Vice President Dick Cheney? "I really, really like him," little Grace said, reeling off factoids about the sly-faced V.P.

Whenever people tell me there's a "liberal bias" in the media, I always wanna say, huh? That piece was like Cheneymania, and in the run-up to an election too.

If the Times had printed a story about a little girl in Topeka who just "really, really likes" Hillary Clinton, what do you think the fall-out would be?

The answer is, the Times just never would. In bending over backwards not to appear partisan, they wind up being a Republican paper. Which they may be anyway; who knows.

That story made me wonder how a child so young arrives at political opinions, and if my own little girl, who's also 6, had any of her own. Certainly she is growing up in a household where her parents talk a lot about politics, but I never actually discuss them with her. We talk about a lot of other things.

So I asked her this morning what she thought of George Bush. And she said, without even looking up from the picture she was drawing (of her hand):

"Mean, selfish, greedy, bad.... And very, very rich."

And then, without explaining the transition, she said,

"You know how I think God is? Wonderful! Happy. Playful... Very, very wonderful.

"And one more thing," she said. "He's graceful."