Barack Doesn’t Need Secret Service, He Needs Hip Hop

The headlines in tomorrow’s daily newspapers will be that the Secret Service is providing security detail for presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, and that this is the earliest that they’ve ever done so. It’s up on the Web already.

In any case, whenever a politician is assigned an elite protection squad it can only be for two reasons, in my opinion. Either a) someone is gunning for him, as in assasination, or b) someone wants to protect him so that he is not assasinated. With Barack, who’s getting support from a broad range of people to run and most importantly, win the U.S. presidency in 2008, I think both are true. I’m not sure as to option A at all, but the instinctual feeling I get is simply that a mixed or even worse, Black president (as some think this man is) is not what some extremists operating in this country want.

Truth be told, Barack doesn’t need Secret Service. Barack needs Hip-Hop. And you know what, so does Hillary Clinton, if the Democrats decide to throw her in the pan instead of Barack. I think both would make a great tandem in the White House, and really, it doesn’t matter who wins as long as it is one of them. I firmly believe both can get the job done and do a great job at it.

About Hip-Hop, though. Everybody loves a little Hip-Hop in their lives, especially these underground rappers like Murs and Jean Grae and what have you who are finally getting their shine at publications like Scheme. Even the bigger heads in the Hip-Hop industry, like, um, say Nas, are down to ‘Rock the Bells,’ you know what I mean?

What does mean to politics? How about everything? Basically, if someone like Obama decided to show up at Rock the Bells and rally the crowd, he’d win the election in a landslide. Ditto for Hillary. With that said, Secret Service can offer pretty decent protection, but the fact is even the Men In Black didn’t stop 9/11, did they?

Reach Slav Kandyba, Scheme’s Contributing Editor, at slavkandyba@gmail.com.