An awkward post about Bill Ayers

They have guns, and all their lives they've wanted to be famous."

This is a jarring line from Ta-Nehisi Coates. He wrote it yesterday, but he's expressing a fear I've had since long before the McCain campaign decided that calling Barack Obama a terrorist sympathizer was their only path to victory.

Just how warranted is this fear? I don't know. Barack Obama is always on the move. And because of quirks in our electoral system, he's often campaigning in parts of the country where violent resentment of African Americans remains a major concern. He's required Secret Service protection for over a year now, and from what I understand it's a busy detail for those agents.

In other words, there's no use pretending that there's no cause for alarm. Things would be a lot easier for me and my peers, as writers and liberals, if things were different--as liberals we want Obama to win, which means we don't want potential voters to be dissuaded by the real fear that the country would have to live through the ensuing nightmare if Obama was elected and then assassinated. But we can't, as writers, entirely wish away the threat. And so I, at least, tend to obliquely refer to the possibility in posts that are really bankshot criticisms of the Republican base, or GOP campaign tactics.

I don't, of course, mean to imply that the situation is so dire that people should prepare to embrace President Joe Biden. Even when Secret Service protections were much, much weaker than they are today, we often went many years without serious attempts on the lives of our presidents. But certain people in this country have become uniquely suspicious of Barack Obama. They are being relentlessly goaded by his opponents, who are members of a party that's built its political fortunes, at least to some extent, on the incitement of violence. They're not going to keep their mouths shut. Much as one can sense a palpable hunger for an October terrorist attack on the right, one gets the feeling that some conservatives might not mind it so much if an attempt on Obama's life were to raise questions about the wisdom of putting him in the White House.

Along those lines, then, my real fear is that the Republicans will sow so much distrust in the millions of Americans who already think Obama is a Muslim radical terrorist sympathizer that we'll be dealing with a heightened threat and a constrained president for the next four or eight years. What a tragedy that would be in its own right.