On November 4, 2008, at just
after 11 P.M., CNN called the presidential election for Barack Obama. The
Obamas watched the returns with extended family at a hotel room near Chicago's
Grant Park, the scene of a quickly growing Obama campaign rally. The densely
packed crowds gathered there broke into cheers and dancing when news
broadcasters announced his win.
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The elated throng was twice the
size expected for the rally - roughly 240,000 people - when Obama finally took
the stage at one in the morning. Few could know the lengths to which the Secret
Service had gone to protect the president-elect for that memorable
twenty-five-minute speech. The Service had installed two van-sized sheets of
bulletproof glass - ten feet high and fifteen feet wide - on the right and left
sides of Obama's lectern. Television viewers couldn't see the glass, but in
person they were as obvious as a two-ton block of ice. The two-inch-thick
plates were intended to shield Obama from the risk of snipers in the high-rises
above the park. Agents tested the placement of the glass by taking up positions
in apartments above and "firing" red laser beams at agents standing
in for Obama. The airspace around the park had also been made a no-fly zone for
the night. The supervisor overseeing protection for the event thanked the Obama
campaign for instantly agreeing to a raft of extra precautions.
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"They never blinked when we
told them we had to do the glass," the supervisor said. "They
understood."
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That night, a large part of the
country celebrated. But for Obama, the danger had ratcheted up exponentially,
literally overnight. The Intelligence Division, which assessed threats to the
president, immediately felt itself struggling to triage and assess a
skyrocketing number of threats. Agents estimated that in the months immediately
before and for several months after he took office, Obama received four times
as many death threats as his predecessors - as many as thirty a day.
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The weekend after the election,
at a Maine convenience store, a sign invited customers to join a betting pool
on when Obama would be assassinated. "Let's hope we have a winner,"
the sign read. In Vay, Idaho, police found a sign on a tree offering a
"free public hanging" of Obama. At North Carolina State University in
Raleigh, anonymous artists had spray-painted KILL THAT NIGGER and SHOOT OBAMA
in a tunnel that students used to cross the campus.
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Carol Leonnig "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service" (2021)
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