Legal Commentary

NY Times on Obama's Security: Clueless or Coy?

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

The New York Times’s Jeff Zeleny has a long article about people worrying about Barak Obama’s safety, In Painful Past, Hushed Worry About Obama.

In the past few days, a major Dallas-area paper ran a two inconclusive stories about the level of security at Obama’s Dallas rally. These stories were supplemented by a number of blog posts all over the place, many of which include eyewitness accounts of recent Obama rallies elsewhere which also seemed to have a level of security that was at best uneven. Given all that, you might expect that when the Times does a major article on fears for Obama’s security, something would be said about what happened in Dallas at the Obama rally.

You would be wrong.

Here’s all that the NYT has to say on the subject of Dallas security:

Here in Dallas, those memories were raised in conversation after conversation with several of the 17,000 people who came to see Mr. Obama at a rally last week.

“Right around the corner is the John Kennedy Memorial; everyone all around me was talking about it,” said Imogene Covin, a Democratic activist from Dallas. “In the back of my mind, it’s a possibility that something might happen because he’s something to gawk at right now. But you know why I think he will be safe? He has a broad range of people behind him.”

In fact, as readers of this blog or many others, or of the Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram, know “here in Dallas,” there was a lot more than “memories raised in conversation” — there were allegations by the local cops of bad security judgment. And the Secret Service’s response while not totally implausible, hasn’t been totally convincing either.

Should we expect better from the Times?

I suppose it’s possible the NYT is being coy as a result of a request from the Secret Service not to discuss operational details, but if that were the case you would think that they could tell us so. I can’t help but wonder if they just didn’t know about the controversy, or if this is another example of an article going into the hopper several days before its printed and being dated by the time it sees daylight.

I’ve written to Mr. Zeleny to ask, but don’t really expect an answer.

Related posts:

• Secret Service Says Low Security is All Part of the Plan
• Look, We Worry About This Stuff

Full post as published by Discourse.net on February 25, 2008 (boomark / email).