WHEN Barack Obama was contemplating running for president, his wife Michelle was openly fearful about the threat of assassination. Last week the Democratic presidential candidate requested Secret Service protection after fears were raised of a white supremacist plot to kill him.

Michelle Obama, 43, said the security arrangements showed “we are moving to the next level of the campaign”. With nine months still to go until the first primary elections, Obama has been drawing huge crowds and is the first candidate to receive protection so early in the campaign. Hillary Clinton already has her own Secret Service detail because of her status as former first lady.

“Security was one of many issues that I have and will have in the course of this campaign,” Michelle Obama said. “But I’ve thought through in my mind all the possible scenarios and how we’re going to handle it.” Mindful of the fate of Martin Luther King, Obama is being granted federal protection as the first African-American with a realistic chance of winning the White House.

The Secret Service denied that it was aware of any specific threats. But Richard Durbin, a fellow senator for Illinois, showed some “unspecified material” including threats to Obama, on websites and in letters to Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader. Reid raised them with the Department of Homeland Security.

One white supremacist website contains the warning: “Our world will become unbearable with him as president. Maybe there would be someone would take a chance and do a Lincoln on him. Is that our only hope?” Abraham Lincoln, a hero of Obama, was shot by John Wilkes Booth at a theatre in 1865.

Obama said at the start of the campaign that security is “something that is on Michelle’s mind”. She has been campaigning enthusiastically on her husband’s behalf, although her ribbing and mockery of Obama have raised eyebrows in a country where the role model for first lady remains the husband-worshipping Nancy Reagan.

As a working mother with two young daughters, Malia and Sasha, Michelle Obama rarely misses a chance to contrast the scatter-brained, often absent husband she knows, who never puts his socks in the dirty laundry, with the saintly Obama of public renown.

“I have some difficulty reconciling the two images,” she said recently. “There is Barack Obama the phenomenon and then there’s the Barack Obama who lives with me and that guy’s a little less impressive. For some reason this guy can’t manage to secure the bread so it doesn’t get stale and his five-year-old is better at making the bed.”

Maureen Dowd, a columnist for The New York Times, pointed out that some people “worried that her chiding was emasculating”.

Michelle Obama’s concerns about her husband’s safety will strike a chord with Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, who cited family worries about his safety when he declined to run for president in 1996.

Michelle Obama comforts herself with the thought that no African-American is free from the threat of violence. “I don’t lose sleep over it because the realities are that, as a black man, Barack can get shot going to the gas station,” she said.

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