While Secret Service staff up only 5.3%

I recently read a book by Ronald Kessler, titled In the President's Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect. In one of the closing chapters, he mentions the fact that as a result of the Bush White House transferring administration of the Service from the executive branch to the cabinet-level DHS, it now has to compete with all the dozens of other agencies for funds. There's also an agency culture that makes it more desirable for agents to leave for private sector jobs than stay in. As a result, what once were four-agent surveillance and protection teams are now two.

Another problem is that the Service also has other areas of concern (e.g., counterfeiting) and are being diverted from protection to those tasks more and more.

One of these days somebody is going to take a shot; hit or miss, the shit is really going to hit the fan then. The rabble-rousers who have been stirring things up are still going to deny responsibility, though

History shows us that the more death threats/assassination attempts an American president gets, the better the job he's doing.

Obama must be doing a fantastic job to have pissed off as many cranks and institutions as he has.