Now, I was a politically aware child. The first campaign I followed was in 1960, when I was in 2nd Grade. I wrote letters to the editor in high school. So I'm not against kids speaking up in the public arena.
What I'm against is making kids into sock puppets for their elders. Something tells me that 12-year-old Graeme Frost isn't writing his own response to Pres. Bush. And those cute kids worrying about programs that primarily benefit old people seem, well, inauthentic to me. Shills for somebody else's medicine show.
But then, it goes along with the whole "do it for the children" mantra of the Clinton '90s. We expand government, create new entitlements, limit freedom -- the whole leftish enterprise -- and who could say NO to "the children?" Teachers do it, too, arguing that whatever is good for teachers MUST be good for children; and feminists do it, identifying the good of children with the good of mothers with the good of all women (mothers or not).
Everybody knows that an individual child may have divergent interests from those of its parents or guardians. That's why we have guardians ad litem and the Coogan Law. In the same way, the interests of children (as a group) often diverge from those of other groups, even those of people who profess to love them and whose responsibility is to care for them.
So to all the lefties and would-be raiders of the public funds, I say: Speak for yourself; quit using children to cover for you.