Barack Obama made history by becoming the first African-American US president-elect, but security agents now face major challenges in protecting him, experts say, as his race may make him more of a target than his predecessors.
The 47-year-old senator who swept to victory on Tuesday has been under protection of the US Secret Service since May last year, 18 months before the election, the earliest-ever security detail for a presidential candidate.
It is an issue few people want to address directly, but as the nation’s first black commander-in-chief Obama will likely face an unprecedented number of threats on his life — including one just last week when two white supremacists, Daniel Cowart, 20, and Paul Schlesselman, 18, were arrested in Tennessee for plotting to kill Obama.
He and his family — as well as vice president-elect Joe Biden and family — are under 24-hour guard by squads of elite, heavily armed agents of the Secret Service, the branch of the Department of Homeland Security tasked with protecting presidents and presidential candidates.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama’s rival in the battle for the Democratic party nomination, has been under Secret Service protection for years due to her status as former first lady.
In an indication of the ramped-up security around the election, Obama’s lectern where he gave his victory speech was shielded by bulletproof plexiglass — the first time his campaign had employed such protection.
“Changes in presidential administrations necessitate a lot of operational planning and implementation in terms of our protective mission,” Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan said, declining to provide specifics on the new security regime or say whether it would be intensified for Obama.
“We make adjustments, obviously. But at this point ... we have planned for every contingency,” he said.
Yet the president-elect’s skin color has only added to concerns in the country, where there are more than 200 million legally owned firearms and about 30,000 gun deaths per year, and where four sitting presidents have been murdered and two more wounded in assassination attempts.
“It’s going to be a unique and challenging environment” for Obama’s security detail, Fred Burton, who is vice president of counter-terrorism at geo-political intelligence analysis firm Stratfor, said.
“The protective security threat and the challenges surrounding the protection for him is extremely difficult. It’s going to take a lot of resources and a tremendous amount of protective and tactical analysis to stay ahead of the bad guys,” said Burton, a former Secret Service agent who was to publish a Stratfor report yesterday on the issue.
While Obama spends the next months plotting his political course and assembling an administration team, extremists — particularly from the US white hate movements — may be plotting to kill him, especially in the chaotic months before he enters the Washington security bubble.
Burton believes protective intelligence agencies have infiltrated white hate groups, whose sympathizers are blamed for the assassinations of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr, Malcom X and Medgar Evers, as a means of thwarting attempts on the lives of protectees.
Evers was gunned down in 1963 by a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a white-supremacy group whose Web site this week carried a video clip warning against an Obama administration.
“I don’t want to sound like a doomsday prophet,” Thomas Robb said on the Klan’s WhitePride.tv. “But what will happen to this nation?”
“A lot of people are concerned if Barack Obama becomes president of the United States. There may be a backlash, there may be many white people throughout this country who will become awakened,” he said.
In January, concerns were such that Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi wrote to officials who oversee the Secret Service to say Obama’s profile “gives rise to unique challenges that merit special concern.”
“As an African-American who was witness to some of this nation’s most shameful days during the civil rights movement, I know personally that the hatred of some of our fellow citizens can lead to heinous acts of violence,” Thompson wrote.
Obama spoke early this year with the New York Times about his life in the security cocoon, saying “I’ve got the best protection in the world,” repeating a line he tells concerned supporters. “So stop worrying.”
For Alnett Wooten, an 86-year-old black woman waiting in line at a Washington polling station on Tuesday, Obama’s fate is in God’s hands.
“I never thought I would live long enough to do it,” she said of voting for a black president. “I just pray that He will keep him safe.”
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