The fact that Barack Obama is now under the protection of the Secret Service, nearly a year earlier than any other candidate Presidential candidate in our history (except HRC, who will remain under the protection of the SS as long as she is married to Bill Clinton) says a great deal about where we are at as a society. Howard Fineman confesses the collective guilt and relief of mainstream white journalists attending the first Republican Presidential debate in Simi Valley when he wrote "I talked to my fellow reporters here about this last night, and they were uniformly relieved. So was I."
Anyone following even mainstream online blogs like Politico.com can see the naked hostility and racism directed Obama's way, if not direct threats to his life. I don't read white supremacist blogs and sites but I can only imagine what is being said. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe that one or more people, who are not stupid enough to post hostile messages on the web, may be actively plotting his demise.
By all accounts, Obama's appearances have generated such large crowds that he would be safer walking through Baghdad with a target on his back. Hiring Blackwater as his praetorian guard would be unthinkable politically for Obama. The damage to America's already horrendous image overseas would be incalculable if any harm were to come to Obama. Michael Chertoff and the Department of Homeland Security, who now run the SS, surely didn't need to be reminded of this and the fact that any attempted or successful assassination would make the election of a Democrat all but inevitable in 2008. This is not to say that keeping Obama safe so that HRC can be eviscerated by the GOP is part of the Republican strategy for 2008, but to ignore this reality would be naive.
Fineman and the liberal media want to keep hope alive and not have a replay of 1968 when we lost MLK and RFK. Fineman muses that "there is an innocence, almost a naiveté, to Obama and his campaign." This is of course ludicrous - naive and innocent men do not run for President. More accurately, the administration doesn't need a martyr on its hands after botching Saddam's execution.
