It’s probably just me, recovering lifelong anxiety guy, but when I was at a Tim Kaine campaign event this past weekend, I found my eyes darting around at the security vulnerabilities, which were legion.
The Waynesboro campaign event was taking place a week to the day from the mass shooting at a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pa., in which the ex-president was wounded, along with two others, and a rallygoer was killed, as a 20-year-old armed with an AR-15 had his way at the outdoor stage from an unprotected warehouse rooftop 500 feet away.
And that Trump rally had scores of Secret Service agents and local and state police ostensibly securing and actively patrolling the scene, with at least three sniper teams scouring the crowd for possible threats.
ICYMI
- House votes to create task force to investigate assassination attempt
- Kimberly Cheatle, not surprisingly, steps down from Secret Service director post
- There are lots of political ‘soft targets,’ and next time, we might not be so lucky
- Thomas Matthew Crooks: What we know about the would-be Trump assassin
- Developing: Trump ‘fine,’ two dead, two wounded, in shooting at Pa. campaign rally
There was no security on the premises for our outdoor event last weekend, which was held at a local brewery, adjacent to a parking lot with people coming and going, and downhill from a tree-lined area maybe a football field away that would provide perfect cover for someone with bad intentions.
These are what you call “soft targets” – and with all 435 seats in the U.S. House, and 34 of the 100 seats in the U.S. Senate, up for re-election this fall, there is literally a campaign event like the one last weekend in Waynesboro going on somewhere in this country every waking hour of every day.
A thought that I can’t get away from is, if there’s another Thomas Crooks out there who wants to make a name for himself, wants to get somebody from the other team, wants to exact political revenge of some or the other sort, man, there are opportunities galore.
I asked Kaine, toward the end of the event, if he had given any thought to the security issue.
“You know, in my interactions with Virginians over 30 years, the number of unpleasant interactions I’ve had with people in person has been less than 10, in 30 years of doing this,” the senator said. “I don’t read social media comments, but if it’s just in person, people treat you, you know, generally they treat me fine, and I just don’t worry about it.”
Which is probably a good attitude to have, personally.
It would be hard to run for and serve in public office if you were constantly worried about the people out there with bad intentions.
That should be for the professionals.
And for people like me, who don’t need much to trigger deep-seated anxieties about such things.
I hesitate to bring this issue up into public discourse, out of fear that the wrong person will read this, and realize, Hey, if I want to make a political statement by shooting a politician, this guy’s right, the Secret Service is going to tighten up what it does for the presidential candidates between now and the November election, but all those other people running for Congress, they’re sitting ducks.
The wrong people have probably already figured this out.
I hope the right people have, too, and that they’re thinking through what they can do to keep people running for public office safe, though I can’t imagine what can be done.
I don’t know that we have the resources to protect every single campaign event, and after Butler, Pa., it may not even be the case that having security on the premises can prevent everything.
My anxiety over things like this has me fearing that we could see a copycat incident, and god save us all if that happens.
We’re already a powderkeg about to explode as it is.
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Chris Graham
