Pettiness is not new in American politics. It has seemed turbo charged in recent years. Standards of conduct are lower. More people in politics seem to equate gratuitous nastiness with strength.

Challenges to the re-nomination of presidents, much like divorces, seem to make particularly bitter antagonists out of otherwise civilized people.

Easygoing Gerald Ford never forgave Ronald Reagan for challenging him. Ford vanquished Reagan, and reconciled with the man who actually ousted him from office in 1976, Jimmy Carter, to the point where Carter spoke at his funeral. But Ford saw to it that his antipathy for Reagan would be expressed even after he was gone. Indeed Ford and Carter bonded over their shared resentment of Reagan.

President Carter was so miffed by Ted Kennedy’s challenge to his re-nomination in 1980 that he actually withheld the posthumous award of the presidential medal of freedom to Ted Kennedy’s slain brother Robert. It fell to President Reagan to present it to RFK’s widow, with a dry comment about the delay, and the incident, so untypical of Carter, did him more damage than was done to Kennedy.

This sort of harrumphing can even be faintly amusing when it involves the withholding of awards and such. There is nothing amusing about games being played with the safety of presidential candidates.  You don’t have to have supported Kennedy’s challenge to President Biden’s re-nomination (we certainly did not) to  be alarmed and offended by the pointed denial of secret service protection requested by Kennedy.

The labored excuses for this lapse, offered by the Biden administration and some of his media allies, reflect the generally hysterical and needlessly harsh overreaction to RFKJ’s quixotic run for the Democratic presidential nomination, which this week he traded in for an independent candidacy (which may turn out to hurt Trump more than Biden).

On July 28th, in the guise of “fact checking,” CNN insisted that Kennedy’s questioning the denial of protection was “highly misleading.”  With unconscious irony that often accompanies consciousness of guilt, we were assured that there was nothing unusual about this denial. Nothing to see here folks. Kennedy, we are instructed,  is “not a serious candidate,”  there is a formula for determining this, it is too early in the election cycle to offer protection anyway, and this is just more conspiracy mongering by RFKJ.

In a time of lengthening political cycles, and wide fluctuations in increasingly unreliable poll ratings and perceived “viability” of national candidates, these standards seem highly subjective. Kennedy’s poll ratings  hover near the 15% most recently cited as a measure of viability. Moreover, unprecedented levels of dissatisfaction with front runners is recorded in these same surveys.

What is “highly misleading” is to suggest that such formulas offer much clarity. It is beyond misleading to suggest flexibility and good judgment does not now, and has  not always,  played a role in these decisions.  Obama, Jesse Jackson, Ben Carson, and Herman Cain all received early  protection, despite distinct underdog status, because of a high number of threats, and/or a lamentable history of race based political assassinations here.  Huey Long was preparing what was widely believed to be a formidable presidential candidacy for 1936, when he was assassinated in 1935.

Despite the aforementioned resentment Carter felt about the challenge from Ted Kennedy, he provided Kennedy Secret Service protection, months before he formally announced. Kennedy was given such protection after George Wallace was shot in 1972, when he was not even a candidate.

The rise in political violence in our time, the threats to candidates and public officials, are well established. So is the Kennedy family history with such. The threat faced by Kennedy’s running for president, the perverse appeal of this target to an unbalanced individual, was widely understood. Last month,  an armed man with a fake Marshall’s badge breached RFKJ’s security, demanding to see him, before being thwarted.

It should hardly be necessary to point these things out.

Some people have decided that they are somehow marginalizing Kennedy politically by denying him protection warranted by any sensible consideration of the situation in its entirety. Perhaps the calculation is made that the campaign paying private security diverts resources from the effort.  This kind of “help” the President does not need. Those who support him, and particularly those who appreciate his decency, ought most resent this abuse of power, and this horrendous judgement.