And none of those are the President of the U.S. It is sad when a given person dies, it is tragic when an assassination triggers an international incident that affects billions through a financial and world policy concerns.
Like others said, the security surrounding the POTUS is not fake at all because it has to be effective. The POTUS receives an absurd number of real death threats and an even greater number of casual ones. All presidents since Kennedy with the exclusion of LBJ :dubious: have had very real assassination attempts on their lives and usually multiple ones that are thwarted by the Secret Service. Those that are successful like Kennedy and even Lincoln still have effects to this day. It is well worth whatever money it costs to prevent such things from happening by putting on what appears to be an impenetrable level of security to those contemplating such a thing.
I am friends with someone who grew up in a Secret Service family. His father was part of of Reagan’s detail when he was shot by John Hinkley Jr. His family had to move immediately to California to take on a less stressful roll of protecting ex-president Gerald Ford. Gerald Ford, the most innocuous of any president that I can think of, had two real attempted assassination attempts on his life (by women with guns) while he was in office. You would think that those would stop once he was out and you would be completely wrong. Some crazies have endurance and carry and extreme grudge so my friend is bitter that his childhood was constantly being interrupted by his father being called off to fight off yet another assassination attempt on someone who had been out of office for years.
It is much worse for sitting Presidents. The attempts are constant and you only hear about the ones that go wrong or come close because the the Secret Service does not like to advertise perceived weaknesses. Every single POTUS would be dead within days of taking office if they did not have those extreme security measures in place.
Perhaps I erred in using the word theater in this context. I understand his security is very real. My wife works in the building just across the road from the hotel where Obama was staying in Brisbane, and in the week prior to his arrival the coffee shop downstairs had a significant increase in the number of young, fit, athletic men with short back and sides, speaking with American accents. Apparently the secret service don’t wear their earpieces when in plain clothes on a morning coffee run
To the best of my knowledge, the Australian PM gets an occasional threat from some nutbag, but no serious death threats that I’m aware of. He does have a security detail to follow him around, that generally amounts to 2-3 guys, but no tanks masquerading as cars, or helicopters on 2 min standby.
What is about the American President that draws so much ire? It’s not even the US as ‘The Great Satan’ though is it? Haven’t most assassination attempts been carried out by domestic threats?
I’ve often wondered if Obama specifically gets more security than past presidents. Be cause really, you don’t want to be the guy in charge of security when America’s first black president gets shot.
[I know, nobody wants to be that guy when *any* president gets shot, but still…]
I never get why people complain about this - side presidents have been shot or killed - that is over 10% - if you went up to a roulette table and knew you’d be shot if one of four or five numbers came up - would you take those odds?
Ex presidents have been targeted as well.
For a while they were going to allow the protection to expire after 10 years - and I believe the law was actually changed, but changed back before it could take effect. We don’t need a dead former president to make us look foolish for letting the law to expire.
You’re exaggerating. Only about 155,000 people die a day worldwide. A day only has 86,400 seconds. Also, how many of them run a government and have people actively try to kill them?
Well, the fact that it was over two-hundred years ago might have something to do with that…
Though I guess that’s a point in favour of the larger issue that US presidents do, in fact, need a bunch of security because people do, in fact, try to kill them fairly regularly.
Not to be snarky, but I’d like to remind you that you live in Australia.
And my favorite guide to Australia is the humorist Bill Bryson’s book “A Sunburned Country”.
He begins the book by pointing out that he, like most people, never has any idea who the current Prime Minister of Australia is. And one of the previous Prime Ministers simply disappeared.
He went for a swim at the beach, and never came back…and the world was not overly concerned about it.
Sure, Bryson is a comedy writer, not a historian.
But the basic point is valid—the Australian PM doesn’t need the same level of security as the US President, because, well… he’s Australian.
Just because we have a deep bench and eventually if you kill enough people the Secretary of Commerce will just be President does not really describe what would happen if somebody assassinated any POTUS, but particularly this one. I can’t even imagine but I expect there’d be rioting. What people elsewhere probably don’t get is how deeply racial a lot of the extreme feelings about this president are, on both sides.
Typically candidates for President receive protection around the time they secure their party nomination or when the race has narrowed heavily. Obama’s detail got approved 9 months before the first primary happened. In assessing the threat against him he’s not even a typical POTUS.
Yes but the Dallas shooting has been elevated to a mythical level when really it was about an angry disaffected young man close (in sniper terms) to his target.
Tell me: without Google just your own memory - who used a M1911 pistol at President Gerald Ford? Thats a .45, a serious gun, no messing about.
Half of Cardiff was closed down for the G20 earlier this year and I suspect a ot of that was due to Obama rather than all the other leaders. It’s fair enough - he’s the directly-elected leader of one of the richest countries in the world and it’d be a much bigger deal if he were assassinated than if anyone else were. The closest in impact would be the Queen, and even that’s not very close.
This is rather jingoistic. “Letting someone die because it costs too much” happens frequently in hospitals, even in America. Then there are things like deciding whether or not to fund homeless shelters or cancer hospices, etc. It’s unavoidable.
I thought it was Sara Jane (who I remembered as Sara Jay for some reason), turned out it was Squeaky. It helps to have the chamber loaded before you try to use it…
Stress makes everyone’s plans go to hell.
The Russians are pretty gung ho about security too, it’s not just the USSS. (Or the SS, as Hunter Thompson was fond of calling them.) I had the “privilege” of going to the same school where the Russian Premier decided to have a chat with Al Gore. Snipers, snipers everywhere; helicopters hovering all over the place, roads blocked off all around the campus: I had classes on the other side of the campus from where the two were bloviating, and it was still a giant pain in the ass.
No Australian PM has ever been assassinated. Until the first time, the threat is often not felt to be significant.
I think US Presidential security wasn’t taken really seriously before Lincoln and Garfield’s deaths…?
British politicians and royalty were targeted for many years by the IRA, with nearly successful attempts against Margaret Thatcher and John Major and the successful assassination of Lord Mountbatten. Italian politicians were targeted by the vicious Red Brigades in the 1970’s, whose most infamous stunt was the kidnapping and execution of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
Neither country reacted with American-style hysteria and imprisoned their leader in a para-military bubble.
I believe American security is excessive, paranoid, and unnecessarily expensive. So many people accompany the President, with so little to do, that we inevitably get crap like the Colombian Prostitute Caper. We should dial it down by at least 90%.
McKinley was the real catalyst. Prior to his assassination, presidents generally relied on local police to provide a couple bodyguards when traveling, and a mish-mash of officials were charged with security at the White House. There was no real security apparatus to speak of, and local police officers did not have any particular bodyguard or security training.
The Secret Service was officially charged by Congress with providing presidential security in 1906, though they did so on an informal basis as early as 1902.
The question is a difficult one to answer, largely because you have to get to the root of why violence if more prevalent in the US than in other industrialized democracies. Like I mentioned earlier, this may partly be the result of the easier availability of firearms in the US, which leads to the country having one of the highest rates of gun-related deaths of all developed nations. Another reason may be historical; Steven Pinker, who wrote an interesting book on the subject on the decline of violence, has the following view about American violence:
I don’t necesarily think that goes far enough to explain why the US has such a high rate of violent crime. With respect threats to American politicians, much of the difference you see in this country versus Western Europe may be the result of the extremely polarized nature of politics in the US and a deeply-rooted antigovernment mentality among a certain subset of the population. Combine this with the history of assassination attempts (like I said, almost all US presidents since Reagan have been subject to actual attempts, not just threats) and you can see why Americans approach presidential security in a much more different way than the Europeans and Australians do.
As others have alluded to, the US President is also simply a higher-profile individual than just about any other politician or public figure in the world.
I, Joseph Biden, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Problem solved.
There’s a solid chain of command, and the VP is chosen for having similar principles and beliefs to the POTUS.
It’ll only start to be a problem if assassinations becomes a common occurrence, as it might make whoever is president too worried to take stances unpopular with violent marginal groups.
My bad… I shouldn’t believe the first result I find on google.
