I'm now REALLY confused about Obama's Secret Service protection....

Durbin concerns lead to Obama's Secret Service detail

Posted by Christi Parsons at 4:55 p.m. CDT

Concerned about the safety of Sen. Barack Obama on the presidential campaign trail, Sen. Dick Durbin two weeks ago went to the Senate’s top Democrat to point out the danger he thought his fellow Illinois Democrat might be in.

Durbin said he told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid about the size of the crowds he’d seen on the campaign trail with Obama, and also that he showed Reid some unspecified material that added to his concern.

That conversation lead Thursday to the assignment of a Secret Service detail to Obama, the earliest in a presidential campaign the service has ever made the decision to cover a candidate not already under their protection as an office holder.

“I wasn’t forcing this on Harry Reid,” Durbin said in an interview with the Tribune on Thursday afternoon. “I gave him what I thought to be the facts of the matter. I asked him, based on his experience, to make a judgment if it should be brought up for consideration.”

more... http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/news_theswamp/2007/05/durbin_concerns.html

20,000 turn out for Obama

By TOM BAXTER, SAEED AHMED
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 04/14/07

At what may have been his largest campaign event this year, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama drew on a hometown hero's words at an Atlanta rally Saturday to voice his opposition to the war in Iraq.

Recalling the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s words that the Vietnam War had become "morally and politically untenable," Obama said the war in Iraq has come to be about "an administration that is trying to preserve its own political viability."

"It is about stubbornness and obstinacy. And we have to keep ratcheting up the pressure every day and every week to tell the president that it is time to change course, that it is time for us to start bringing our combat troops home from Iraq," the Illinois senator and Democratic presidential candidate told an enthusiastic midday crowd at Yellow Jacket Park on the Georgia Tech campus.

Officials estimated the crowd size at 20,000, making it one of Obama's largest rallies. His turnout also would make it one of the biggest presidential political rallies in Atlanta's history, and easily the largest this early in the race — 18 months before the election.

Obama drew more metro Atlantans than then-President Bill Clinton did when he stumped here in 1996 and attracted an estimated 10,000 people. George W. Bush drew about 2,200 people when he made a campaign stop in Duluth in March 2000, nine months before his first election to the White House.

more... https://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/atlanta/stories/2007/04/14/0414metobama_web.html

Estimated attendance at other public appearances this year for presidential hopeful U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, who spoke in Atlanta on Saturday:

• 1,500-plus in Fairfax, Va., on Feb. 2

• 15,000-17,000 in Springfield, Ill., on Feb. 10

• 5,000-plus in Ames, Iowa on Feb. 11

• 7,000 in Chicago on Feb. 11

• 15,000-20,000 in Austin, Texas, Feb. 23

• 10,000-plus in Cleveland on Feb. 26

• 1,000-plus in Des Moines, Iowa, on March 9

• 10,000 in Oakland, Calif., March 17

• 1,000 in Oklahoma City on March 19

• 2,200 in Keene, N.H., on April 2