[ By: Peter Birkenhead ]
The menu at the Cabin was long, one of those unwieldy, laminated mega-menus that grace the tables of roadside diners and chalets everywhere, and reflected a classic attention to theme (gumbo burger, gumbo omelet, gumbo). If the menu had been covered in tinfoil, I would’ve had a late-summer tan by the time I reached the dessert page. When our waiter approached, I asked — in what I imagined was a small act of clever, Yankee defiance — if the gumbo was any good.

My friend Gabbie and I had come directly from a tour of a former sugar plantation down the road, in Vacherie, La., called Oak Alley, and I had a crook in my neck. Up until that morning, whenever I heard the word “plantation,” I’d thought “slavery.” When I’d booked the tour, I had done so in the spirit of a visitor to Dachau or Wounded Knee. But the tour itself was given in the spirit of a visit to the home of a tasteful, Southern movie star. Our guide, in a tone equal parts admiring and envious, devoted 90 minutes to the armoires, linens and chamber pots of the home, but almost no time to the people who built, creased and cleaned them. The words “slave” and “slavery” were never mentioned.

“I guess the white people in antebellum drag getting misty about ‘the Golden Age of the South’ might have been our first clue,” Gabbie observed.

We did hear the word “servant” on the tour, two or three times, in the telling of what were meant to be amusing anecdotes about the idiosyncrasies of the servants’ owners. Our guide was dressed in an elaborate, sky-blue ball gown, and chirped about what fun it was for her to “go back in time and live like Scarlett O’Hara for a day.”

As Gabbie read from the menu in her best Vivien Leigh, her eyes began to widen. She dropped the drawl and informed me that the Cabin had been serving busloads of visitors to Louisiana’s plantation country for more than 30 years on the strength of its reputation for authenticity, which the menu explained thusly: “Our goal is to preserve some of the local farming history, serve meals typical of the River Road tradition, and make your visit a relaxed and memorable one. The Cabin Restaurant began as one of the 10 original slave dwellings of the Monroe Plantation. Through the efforts, ideas, the love, sweat and patience of friends and family, you are able to enjoy a small sampling of Southern Louisiana history.”

The love, sweat and patience of actual participants in the “local farming history,” the original builders and tenants of the Cabin, were not dwelt upon or mentioned in the menu’s text, but their contribution to the restaurant’s ambience was subtly alluded to. As the waiter brought our food I read: “In the grand dining room, the roof is supported by four massive beams ? placed so that the room resembles a Garconnier (the visiting bachelor’s quarters on a river road plantation.)”

And we put our menus down. I’ve enjoyed almost every spoonful of gumbo I’ve had over the years, whether in expensive restaurants, coffee shops or train stations, but I might have had my last one contemplating the events witnessed by the roof beams of a “visiting bachelor’s quarters” on a 19th-century sugar plantation.

When the Civil War ended, there were no truth and reconciliation commissions formed to process memories, no Nuremberg Trials to enable reflection, no Great Emancipator to free the future from the past — only ghosts and the ravenous politics of memory. The need for national reckoning was quickly subordinated to the political imperative of reunification, and on both sides of the Mason Dixon line, forgetting became more valuable than remembering.

Southern apologists earned sudden fortunes in a gold rush of nostalgic forgetting. Within a year of the war’s end, a Virginia journalist named Edward Pollard published a novel called “The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates,” a breathless, self-pitying fantasy, and the first of many to recast the conflict as a tragedy of fraternal strife and regional repression, to blame the Confederate defeat on the overwhelming resources and underhanded tactics of the North, exalt the Confederacy’s most ruthless generals as paragons of honor, revel in stories of freed people run amok, wallow in tearful, postwar family reunions, and pine for the “Golden Age” of hoop- skirts and happy-go-lucky chattel. It depicted slavery as a benign if not beneficial institution, and relegated further discussion on the topic to the offstage realm of “touchy” subjects, where, for perpetual Northern fear of offending delicate Southern sensibilities, it has languished ever since.

“Have you ever dreamed of waking up to an antebellum room that would be the envy of Scarlett O’Hara? The fulfillment of just such a dream is the essence of the Edgewood experience. Hosts Dot and Julian Boulware offer eight luxurious and charming guest rooms; six in the main house and two in the former slave’s quarters.”

— Country Collections Magazine.

The scores of histories and plantation novels that followed Pollard’s, many produced by members of what came to be known as the Dunning School (after its founder, Columbia history professor William Archer Dunning), an influential movement of celebrity, revisionist scholars — a sort of mutton-chopped Heritage Foundation — helped concoct a broad, new Southern culture of perpetual grievance and nostalgia for a reimagined, antebellum idyll. The primary focus of most Dunning School stories was not the war itself, but Reconstruction, a period that Claude Bowers, an early-20th-century successor to Pollard (and given to similarly Glenn Beck-ian flights of tearful, dissociative rage) called “The Tragic Era.” It was a decade, as he saw it, marked by unrestrained Yankee corruption and sadism, which punished the South for secession and forced black suffrage on an already politically neutered white population. Bowers’ books demonized “fanatic” abolitionists and Ulysses S. Grant, exalted the Ku Klux Klan and Andrew Johnson, and sold hundreds of of thousands of copies.

“When a nigger died they let his folks come out the fields to see him afore he died. They buried him the same day, take a big plank and bust it with a ax in the middle enough to bend it back, and put the dead nigger in betwixt it. They’d cart them down to the graveyard on the place and not bury them deep enough that buzzards wouldn’t come circlin’ round. Niggers mourns now, but in them days they wasn’t no time for mournin’.

— Mary Reynolds, former slave, 1936

By 1932, and the publication of “Gone With the Wind” — the ultimate Lost Cause novel and still the most popular book in America, after the Bible — Lost Cause literature succeeded in sacrificing the very meaning of the Civil War to the demands of myth-making. (The 1939 movie sealed the deal.) The culture of forgetting had become a national religion.

Seventy years later, movies like “The Help” — the latest in a long line of tributes to the unsung white heroes of black history, and a gauzy rendering of the civil rights era as a triumph of the human spirit over mean people — have taken up where “Gone With the Wind” left off. A direct descendant of Lost Cause culture, modern nostalgia is souvenir nostalgia, a taxidermical, preservation-fetish that isolates parts from wholes, pulls symbols out of context, and shrinks cultural memories to the size of a 9/11 commemorative coin. (Never Forget!) It’s woven into every corner of the culture, high and low, North and South, as pervasive as sleep. And it is a black hole of memory, the place where memory goes to die.

“One woman thought all the slave houses (now guest rooms) should be torn down, because it was an insult and exploiting slavery and so forth. And I replied, very nicely, that I think she would be destroying history.”

— Mary Hill Caperton, manager of the Quarters, a bed and breakfast in Charlottesville, Va.

The Cabin is only one of dozens of former slave quarters around the country that have been gussied-up into hotel rooms or restaurants. It was exceedingly pleasant and brightly lit, full of cheerful, laughing patrons. Astonishingly tall, wholesome-looking children in middle-school basketball jerseys pointed ketchup-dipped fries at their dad’s brows and made gentle jokes about their hairlines. The Doobie Brothers’ “China Grove” bubbled down from speakers in the rafters.

A man with a wide smile appeared next to our table, seemingly out of nowhere, and introduced himself as the restaurant’s manager. We chatted about the proper pronunciation of “crawfish,” and the differences between the gumbos made on the bayou and in New Orleans, and when the subject turned to the Cabin, I asked him how it felt to run a place that used to house slaves. “It’s history, and that’s all there is to it,” he said. “It’s not something we dwell on, or push out there for people to see. It is a touchy subject. We just want people to have a nice time when they come here, and to enjoy the food and the history. This is a place where everybody feels welcome.”

He had a point. Gabbie and I seemed to be the only ones in the room not smiling, and for a moment the queasiness of chronic self-doubt, the familiar nausea of the self-ostracized, the vegetarian in the steakhouse, made me wonder if it was us. Were we the ones not seeing straight, arching our eyebrows through a life on the wrong side of the looking glass? And then I wondered why I was flattering myself.

Dead-eyed nostalgia, whether practiced by Tea Partyers, advertising directors or me, in my “heritage” running shoes, typing away on a computer built by indentured servants, can be invisible to us. As invisible as the whip — the very old, well-used buggy whip — hanging on the Cabin’s wall must have been to whoever decided it was a good idea to hang it there.

Back then, black and white lived apart, went to different schools and churches, played on different playgrounds, and went to different restaurants, bars, theaters, and soda fountains. But we shared a country and a culture. We were one nation. We were Americans.”

— Pat Buchanan

Don’t get me wrong — I like nostalgia, I miss nostalgia. The kind that involves remembering, anyway: mostly private, typically accidental, not always rosy. When my great-uncle told stories about flying bomber missions over Germany, he didn’t merely recall events — experiences that he had a complicated affection for — he wondered about them. His eyes grew pained and befuddled; his chest rose and fell with a fullness no amount of time could diminish. He wasn’t running from himself to an imagined past, he was finding himself in his story, sorting it out, trying to see it clearly.

House (now Speaker) John Boehner recently complained that Barack Obama and congressional Democrats “are snuffing out the America that I grew up in.”

— Think Progress, July 1, 2010 [ REPUBLICAN JOHN BOEHNER: DEMOCRATS ARE SNUFFING OUT THE 'JIM CROW? AMERICA I GREW UP IN; STUPID, GOD-DELUDED SHARRON ANGLE ]

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Of course childhood nostalgia — the kind of remembering you do when remembering is new, when memories are full and dramatic because they’re few, and weightless — is different. Mourning hamsters. Idealizing grandparents. Chronicling summers like they’re centuries. When I had 12 years to look back on, they were eons. When I had 20 I said, “my whole life” and meant it.

But the past I remembered then wasn’t even my own. I sported a ridiculous ’50s trench coat and well-thumbed copies of “On the Road” in the ’80s the way 20-year-olds in ancient Rome probably carried Euripides in their vintage Greek togas. When you’re young, nostalgia isn’t about the past, but the future. It’s a train in the distance, a sound from the old days hinting at the new. When your own past is too frightening to look at, and the future is terrifyingly unknown, you fake your way through the present. I spent my days wanting something I couldn’t name, and because I didn’t have memories to attach to that yearning, I yearned for a time before me. I conjured a past and missed it and bought an overcoat I prayed I’d grow into.

Lincoln’s famous “house divided” analogy was a perfect one for a country in crisis, acknowledging as it did the psychic architecture of the nation, a collection of rooms under one roof. But his deep commitment to an authentic, family-like, postwar reconciliation was not matched by his successors. The North’s implementation of Reconstruction, in its moderate and radical forms, amounted to first coddling, then humiliating, a wayward sibling.

After Lincoln’s assassination, Republicans struck an implicit deal with the South, a sort of economic/cultural tradeoff, in which the South was allowed to construct the edifice of the Lost Cause culture in return for letting Northern investors exploit the South’s resources. For decades after the war, at cemetery and monument dedications, Blue-Gray reunions and Veterans Day parades, Northern politicians and former generals made a point of describing the conflict in the language of the Lost Cause, praising the chivalry of once-estranged brothers, lauding their former enemy’s fierce dedication to their mission, and rarely acknowledging what that mission had been. The relative postwar silence of the North on the issue of slavery, and the flagrant corruption of newly established Union military governments, helped stoke already flourishing Southern resentment and denial. Instead of beginning a period of reflection, the South spent the late 19th century dressing up in old uniforms and comforting itself with revisionist stories. [ DISGUISING HATE AS HERITAGE: THE NEO-CONFEDERATE TRADITION OF REFIGHTING THE CIVIL WAR ]

Commemorating 150 Years of Treason: The Glamorization and Sanitization of The Confederacy

Confederate Nostalgia: ‘Racists’ Attend $100 Per Head Secession Ball To Whitewash Slavery

Nullification & Secession: Treasonous Confederate Themes Back in Fashion

The Reconstruction-era South didn’t invent dishonesty, but its response to America’s defining trauma has become a foundational lie, supporting an ever-growing edifice of false history. It’s a lie so big no one will forcefully challenge it, a lie that’s too big to fail. In the sesquicentennial year of the Civil War, the “stars and bars” fly over state capitals, proclamations are issued that honor the Confederacy without mentioning slavery, and commuters drive to work on highways named after white supremacists. And appeals to wounded pride and the lost values of imagined pasts are an everyday part of our political culture.

Just like Pollard and Bowers before them, modern-day, Lost Cause-ers like Pat Buchanan reversed the tide of postwar popular opinion about a conflict, this time in Vietnam, by pining loudly for a law-and-order Eden that had been despoiled by protesters. And now the wholly invented fiction of hippies spitting on soldiers returning from Southeast Asia is believed by more Americans than remember what My Lai was.

The same pattern has repeated itself many times, from Morning in America to WMD, from the Swift Boaters to the Tea Party. The decade following the Civil War amounted to a tragic, missed opportunity for the South to engage in a different kind of remembering. Even a little grown-up nostalgia could have gone a good, long way. The illness implied in its suffix, the sickness of the heart that a powerful longing produces, can be as necessary and cleansing as a storm. But of course that’s what the Lost Causers were afraid of, are afraid of still, and have always been quick to nip in the bud.

WASHINGTON — President Reagan said Thursday that he has decided not to visit the site of a Nazi concentration camp during his trip to Europe next month because he wants to focus on peace rather than the past. He added that he believes West Germany’s present sense of collective guilt for the Holocaust of World War II, in which millions of Jews were killed, is “unnecessary.”

— The Los Angeles Times, March 2, 1985

During a tour of Houmas House, another Louisiana River Road plantation, as our guide told a story about the acquisition of a particularly expensive set of silver by the proprietors of the estate, we wandered to a window, and noticed a ramshackle structure in the distance, maybe 70 yards away. Unmarked, unrenovated, unattended, a dilapidated cottage with a small front porch, half reclaimed by grass. A former slave cabin? Our guide said yes, and that plans to renovate the structure were in the works. She added that we were free to go out and take a look, once the tour was over.

Later that day, at Destrehan, a former sugar plantation a few miles down, the guide neglected to mention that it was the site of the largest slave revolt in American history.

When I asked Angela da Silva, a professor of black history at Lindenwood University, and owner of the St. Louis-based National Black Tourism Network, for her thoughts, she said, “Jesus coming down off the cross couldn’t get me to stay in some gentrified slave cabin with a jacuzzi in it. The misery and pain that happened in those cabins ? This is about shame. People who own these places want the history to go away. But it won’t go away. And until we as black people insist on the story being told, no one has any incentive to change their business model.”

Da Silva grew up just a few miles from the Baker plantation in Missouri, where her family worked as slaves from 1837 until the end of the war. She learned almost nothing in school about slavery, she says, but her grandmother told her stories that she remembers to this day. As she spoke about sleeping in the same bed with her grandmother until she was 10, and waking up in the middle of the night to ask questions about her ancestors and life on the plantation, her voice softened, and she cleared her throat. I could hear her slow, full breathing over the phone.

“Once you got here, we were all the same. Isn’t that remarkable? But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.”

— U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann

Founding Fathers’ Owned Slaves; The ‘Evils of Slavery’ & Michele Bachmann’s Lies

Slavery is rarely mentioned on any private plantation tour. Proprietors typically insist that innovative architecture and interesting design justify their focus on the “Big Houses,” but that argument can be awfully hard to fathom. Leaving aside obvious exceptions like Monticello, surely the most notable thing about most plantations is not who lived there, who designed them or what they look like. A beautiful home made beautiful by slaves is not important for its beauty. To elevate aesthetic elements over history in the public presentation of slave estates is to demote people once inventoried like candlesticks to a status even lower than that of things. It’s an obscenity.

There is a small museum on the site of the I.G. Farben Building in Germany (a building that, it should be noted, is considered an architectural masterpiece), the former headquarters of the company responsible for enslaving hundreds of thousands of prisoners at its notorious “factories.” It’s dedicated to the memory of a former prisoner, and exhibits photos and documents from Farben’s disgraceful past. Tour guides at Auschwitz itself do not include the commandant’s extravagant house on their schedule. The point isn’t that American slavery is the exact moral or material equivalent of the Holocaust, but that our country’s “original sin” has not been fully, culturally processed.

If America is a family, it’s a family that has tacitly agreed to never speak again — not with much honesty, anyway — about the terrible things that went on in its divided house. Slavery has been taught, it has been written about. There can’t be many subjects that rival it as an academic ink-guzzler. But the culture has not digested slavery in a meaningful way, hasn’t absorbed it the way it has World War II or the Kennedy assassination. We don’t feel the connections to it in our bones. It’s hard enough these days to connect with what happened 15 minutes ago, let alone 15 decades, given the endless layers of “classic,” “heirloom,” “traditional” “collectible,” “old school” comfort we’re swaddled in. But isn’t it the least we could do? What is the willful forgetting of slavery if not the coverup of a crime, an abdication of responsibility to its victims and to ourselves?

If it’s true that we’re all breathing Caesar’s breath — that because of the finite amount of perpetually moving molecules on Earth, one or two that he breathed are in each of our exhalations — then we don’t need to dress up in his clothes to connect ourselves to the past, we’re already wearing them. The past is with us always, but we need to live with it, open our eyes and poke around in it, take it all in: the good, the bad and the mythic, if we want to stay connected to the ever-changing present.

Huffington Post: Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) again went after Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) with coarse words on a conservative talk radio show Monday. Houston radio host Michael Berry asked West to play a “free association game” and say the first thing that pops into his mind in an “undiplomatic, unscripted” way. Berry said Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

“I need a bucket,” he said.

Berry then mentioned the July 19th incident when West e-mailed Schultz and members of the Democratic and Republican leadership with the subject line: “Unprofessional and Inappropriate Sophomoric Behavior from Wasserman-Schultz.” [ READ MORE ]

Elsewhere, Fox’s “Narcissist” Bill O’Reilly “explained” to Jon Stewart that he will gladly pay higher taxes as a job creator when the government stops wasting his money. See video below:

Exclusive – Bill O’Reilly Extended Interview Pt. 1

Exclusive – Bill O’Reilly Extended Interview Pt. 2

Bonus NUT-Bag Video

Indecision 2012 – Indecision Edition – Chris Christie’s Answer. The inscrutable Chris Christie continues to confound pundits hoping for a straight answer regarding his intentions to run for president.

Indecision 2012 – Indecision Edition – DING-BAT Sarah Palin Still Deciding. Sarah Palin reassures America that not every possible Republican candidate has made a clear decision.

AmeriFam: Samantha Bee gives a struggling American family all the advantages of corporatehood, with a huge can of “You’re welcome.”

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Huffington Post: Black members of the tea party movement last Wednesday rejected charges that the group’s activists are racist, saying they oppose President Barack Obama because of his policies not his skin color.

The members gathered at a Washington news conference in the wake of allegations about its rank and file, heightened by the recent split with a Tea Party Express leader who had posted a letter on his blog written from “Colored People” to Abraham Lincoln. The post suggested that black people would choose slavery over having to do real work.

The black members said the racism that has been attributed to the tea party movement came from outsiders who infiltrated the groups to discredit their work and it should be rejected.

“These people do not oppose Barack Obama because of his skin color. They oppose him because of his policies,” said Lloyd Marcus, a spokesman for the group. [ READ MORE ]

Other Tea-party News:

Tea Party Hypocrites: Nathan Deal, Rick Scott and New York’s Gubernatorial Candidate Carl Paladino — One uses taxpayer money to rail against taxes, another’s tainted by Medicaid fraud, a third secretly pocketed thousands from a government contract. These three cases do not amount to an indictment of the Tea Party movement overall as much as a reminder of its frailties. John Avlon on three candidates making a mockery of the movement’s message. [ READ MORE ]

Tea-Party Music, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and Nevada’s Sharon Angle

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Uncle Michael Steele’s RNC Leadership Failure

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Former editor and publisher ace, Joe Struff has an article at Media Matters about whether or not the Washington bureaus of the major news organizations will cover Glenn Beck’s glorified book party on August 28th, at or near the exact spot where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream Speech” exactly 47 years earlier.

While the jury is still out on whether or not Beck will obtain a permit for the event at the Reflection Pool– he won’t actually be on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, as was Dr. King — one apparent hurdle seems less of one today. Major remodeling will close the Reflecting Pool. However, that — although it won’t take place for two years, it won’t start before October, apparently. Conservatives today are hotly pursuing the idea that Dr. King was not a socialist. As if that fact somehow alone condones Beck turning “I Have a Dream” into “I Have a Scheme.” in some cases going so far as to suggest Dr. King was actually a conservative. Of course, that was still not the craziest example of turning something on its head here.

GLENN BECK, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: We are the inheritors and the protectors of the civil rights movement. They are perverting it. We are on the right side of history. We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties. And damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights moment. We will take that movement, because we were the people that did it in the first place. Whites don’t own Abraham Lincoln. Blacks don’t own Martin Luther King.

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   By: Ed Pilkington
Protecting Barack Obama has presented the US secret service with the greatest challenge in its history, not least because the real threat comes from right wing extremist groups operating inside America.

In just over a year, the number of groups has risen from 149 to 512. “Anger is spilling over from people who believe Obama is coming to remove their liberties, seize their guns, enslave the white American nation. What’s new is that they can now recruit and communicate online, and that makes it very much more dangerous for the president.”

The Southern Poverty Law Centre began life in 1971 as a tiny law firm specialising in civil rights cases. It took on the might of the Ku Klux Klan, and was duly rewarded by having its offices razed and its senior lawyers targeted for assassination.

But it kept on going and grew to be one of the most respected monitoring groups of right-wing extremism in America today.

Recently it brought out a report called Terror From the Right, which identifies, in chronological order, the serious home-grown plots, conspiracies and racist rampages that have been cooked up in America since the Oklahoma City bomb in 1995.

The list runs to 10 pages of closely printed type and itemises 75 domestic terrorism events, from plans to bomb government buildings to attempts to kill judges and politicians.

Each of the incidents aimed to change the political face of America through violence, courtesy of groups with such titles as Aryan People’s Republic, The New Order and The Hated. But in the summer of 2008 the chronology takes on a sharp change of tack.

Entries, which had been running at one or two per year, start coming faster. And instead of a variety of different targets, one name crops up time and time again: Barack Obama.

The first such entry is for June 8, 2008. Six people, linked to a militia group in rural Pennsylvania, are arrested with stockpiles of assault rifles and homemade bombs. One of the six allegedly tells the authorities that he intended to shoot black people from a rooftop and predicts civil war should Obama, who five days previously had cleared the Democratic nomination for president, be elected to the White House.

   President Obama surrounded by security in this 2008 picture.

Next entry: August 24, 2008. The day before the opening of the Democratic convention in Denver at which Obama was nominated, three white supremacists are arrested in possession of high-powered rifles and camouflage clothing. They are talking about assassinating Obama.

October 24 2008: Less than two weeks before the election, two white supremacists are arrested in Tennessee over a bizarre plan to kill more than 100 black people, including Obama.

January 21, 2009: The day after Obama’s inauguration, a white man is arrested in Massachusetts, having allegedly killed two black immigrants and injured a third. He says he was “fighting for a dying race”.

June 10, 2009: James von Brunn, aged 88, walks into the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and shoots dead a security guard. Von Brunn, who died last month in jail awaiting trial, left a note that read: “Obama was created by Jews.”

In the 13 months that Barack Obama has been the occupant of the Oval Office he has been the subject of an extraordinary outpouring of emotion from the American electorate.

At the start it was largely adulatory, though more recently the adoration has been drowned out by a cacophony of criticism from tea party activists, birthers, global-warming deniers and viewers of Fox News. At the same time, largely hidden from view, there has been a layer of antagonism towards Obama that lies well beyond the boundaries of reasonable political debate.

That has been a fact of life for Obama and his family since long before they took the keys to the White House. On May 2, 2007, fully 18 months before election day, he was assigned a secret service detail — much earlier than any other presidential candidate in American history.

The precise reasons for the move have never been disclosed, but there was certainly a mood in the air sufficiently palpable to disconcert Michelle Obama.

A senior US official in the State Department has told the Guardian that before he decided to run for the presidency, Obama had actively to win Michelle over to the idea by assuaging her fears about the potential of an attack on him, her and/or their two daughters.

Michelle would have been aware of the backstory here: that Colin Powell had declined to run for the 1996 Republican nomination partly because his wife Alma feared his assassination at the hands of white supremacists.

Over the course of the long presidential race, Michelle spoke openly about her anxieties and how she had determined to overcome them, telling 60 Minutes that she had decided to fling herself into the race because “I am tired of being afraid”.

According to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s new account of the 2008 election, Game Change, she eventually felt relaxed enough to crack sardonic jokes about the subject. “I’ve already gone out and increased our life insurance on (Barack),” she quipped. “You just can’t be too careful!” But as the Southern Poverty Law Center survey shows, the issue of safety and the 44th president remains anything but a laughing matter.

“Virtually every domestic terrorist event we have identified since June 2008 — when it became obvious that Obama was going to win — has been directly related to him,” says the author of the report, Mark Potok.

Apart from the Obamas themselves, the burden of such a threat falls primarily on the shoulders of the US secret service, and as Joseph Petro, head of global security for Citigroup, puts it, the challenges facing the service today are unlike any period that has gone before. On top of all the usual risks associated with guarding the world’s most powerful politician, there is now the added, explosive ingredient of his race.

“As the first black president he creates a whole other set of issues for the secret service to deal with,” he says.

Petro can claim to be something of an expert in this area: he spent 23 years as a special agent in the service, four of them, from 1982 to 1986, as the man who stood beside Ronald Reagan. He knows what it’s like to be the last line of protection, how it feels to be in a milling crowd in which you are surrounded by thousands of potential assailants, what it is to live with the constant knowledge that any mistake — a split second taking your eye off the ball — could be fatal.

Petro has a formula for measuring the potential dangers for any particular incumbent of the White House. You take the general atmosphere of the times in which they are in office and combine it with the specific personality that the president brings to the job. In both regards, he says, Obama presents a huge task.

Big challenge

“In Obama, we have a president with a very unique personality who likes to be out with the people. Put that together with the political atmosphere of these times that is highly partisan and vitriolic, then include race, and we’ve got a big challenge. There’s no margin for error.”

Petro’s point about the role the president’s personality plays in his own safety is ably illustrated by the single most disastrous failure in the secret service’s history — the event that every incoming trainee agent spends hours and hours studying until it is drilled into his or her bone marrow.

Judged by modern security standards, the shooting of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, should for several reasons never have happened. The parade route Kennedy took was publicised in advance — a cardinal sin by the rule book of today.

Lee Harvey Oswald had a relatively easy line of fire from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, which would these days have been thoroughly swept and sealed off. But it was the orders given by Kennedy himself that did for him — the president asked for the removable plastic roof panels to be taken off his limousine and for agents not to ride on the back of the car, thus leaving himself utterly exposed.

In the last analysis, as Kennedy proved at his own cost, a president can only be as safe as he allows himself to be. Agents can advise the commander-in-chief what is best for his security, but they cannot give him orders.

Public engagement

During his presidential campaign, Obama would regularly mingle among crowds of astonishing size. But since his inauguration he has clearly responded to the guidance of his protecting agents, detaching himself considerably from direct public engagement. To some extent, that is only normal — he is no longer running in an election.

But for a president who promised to break down barriers between politicians and people, it is noticeable how sparingly he is seen in public these days, and how the events he does appear at are almost invariably staged indoors.

Over the years, the secret service has developed a range of technological devices for improving security. Petro recalls asking Reagan on several occasions to wear a bulletproof vest. (Reagan would grumble and groan but usually comply.)

Over the last decade, such innovations have come thick and fast. A whole new array of gadgetry has been added to the service’s armoury, from face-recognition technology to a new generation of armoured vehicles.

Obama rides in a Cadillac with military grade eight-inch thick doors; on election night in November 2008 he gave his victory speech to a crowd of almost a quarter of a million people from behind bullet-proof glass walls designed to foil sniper attacks.

But gadgetry is only as effective as the people who use it. In the last analysis, the human factor remains supreme, as was illustrated last November when two reality show hopefuls gatecrashed a White House function, penetrating the inner core of the building and shaking Obama’s hand. As it happened, they had no malice towards the president. But in the mindset of the mortified secret service that didn’t matter; they could have done.

Which on some level is the nature of the beast: being president of the United States is a high-risk enterprise, as Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John Kennedy all found out the hard way. Danger can come at a president from any number of directions.

Impaired capacity

It can come from the lone deranged gunman. It can come too, theoretically, from international terrorism of the Islamist variety. But al-Qaeda experts point out that the closest the group has come to a direct attack on the president was 9/11 itself.

“From al-Qaeda’s view, to assassinate the president would be very desirable,” says Yehudit Barsky, a terrorism specialist at the American Jewish Committee. “But it would be difficult for them to go after him not because they don’t want to but because their capacity is so impaired.”

Which is why in the overall assessment of risk to Obama, so much attention is settling on right-wing extremist groups who are already operating inside America, are armed and ideologically motivated, and in some cases potentially capable of desperate acts.

This brings us back to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been tracking the activity of potentially violent militia groups since the last great wave in the 1990s when the so-called Patriot movement ballooned in proportion to rising rightwing anger towards Bill Clinton and fears of impending gun control. That wave of opprobrium culminated in the Oklahoma bombing in which 168 died and 680 more were injured.

The centre’s latest report, released last week, records an astonishing mushrooming in extremist anti-government Patriot groups who see the Obama administration as a plot to impose “one-world government” on liberty-loving Americans. The numbers leapt from 149 in 2008 to 512 groups in 2009, of which 127 were classed as paramilitary groups.

“We know there has been a spike in activity across a broad range of things, particularly with regard to the notion that this government is illegitimate,” says Brian Levin, a criminologist who heads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University.

Conspiracies

Levin says the phenomenon is evident in rural areas around the Appalachian mountains and Great Lakes and into the west and Pacific north-west, where new armed militia groups are spontaneously emerging; and he has no doubt about why this is happening right now: “We’ve always had people who hate the president, we’ve always had conspiracies, but the fact that we have a black president at a time of economic tumult makes these conspiracies much more volatile among a far wider group of people.”

Chip Berlet, an analyst of right-wing extremism at the Massachusetts-based group, Political Research Associates, estimates that there have been nine murders by individuals who have white supremacist, xenophobic or anti-semitic leanings since the inauguration of Obama. Berlet sees similarities in the current foment to the militia agitation of the 1990s.

“Anger is spilling over from people who believe Obama is coming to remove their liberties, seize their guns, enslave the white American nation. What’s new is that they can now recruit and communicate online, and that makes it very much more dangerous for the president.”

Montana is one of the rural states where resurgent extreme right-wing activity can be detected. Travis McAdam has been tracking such activity for the last two decades on behalf of the Montana Human Rights Network, so has a unique vantage point for what is going on today.

“The hatred that’s there is very real. It’s more than a gut-level hatred of having an African-American as president, it’s also ideological — these people see black people as sub-human. Groups are popping up that have a new message and are using Obama to recruit new members.”

White supremacist forums that provide closed talking shops for members only have been abuzz with anti-Obama rhetoric since the presidential election. In one such talkboard, monitored by a watchdog group, a correspondent writes: “If we want to see the overthrow or the cleansing of society then we should support Obama being where he is! I believe in the coming war. With this Nig as President he will just speed up the process. He’s a catylist! Is’nt this what we want?”

Another says: “Our backs are really against the wall now. We need progressive activism and we need to be solution orientated. For a Whiter future for our children.” Yet a third says: “I never thought I’d ever see the day when a monkey ran my country & I’m 34. I weep for our children.”

For McAdam, the crucial question is how to sort this body of vitriol into its constituent parts — to separate out those individuals and groups who may be offensive and repulsive in their choice of words but are essentially harmless, from those that have the potential to be truly violent. He likes to think of it as a funnel, at the top of which are many people drawn to radical right groups for all sorts of reasons — gun rights, taxation, Obama-as-alien, or whatever. Most never go further than that level, but some do.

Oklahoma bomber

“As they dig into the subject, going down into the funnel, they start to lose connection with the social networks around them that keep them tied to normality. Down, down they go, and eventually out the other end of the funnel emerges the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh, who says, ‘Our country is under attack, I must do something about it.’”

It’s the thought that some may be emerging from the end of the funnel at this politically charged moment, McAdam says, that bothers him so, and makes him think that “violence against President Obama is a real concern”.

McVeigh, executed in June 2001, is a name that crops up frequently among the extremism monitors. It comes up again when Mark Potok gives his last word on the threat to Barack Obama.

The white supremacists and anti-government militia who are out to get the president should not be underestimated, he says. “These groups aren’t al-Qaeda. Most of them look vastly more bumbling than effective.” But then he adds: “It only takes one to get through. Timothy McVeigh taught us that.”

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