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" Chicago police charged three men with plotting terrorist acts around the NATO summit, including at the president&amp;#039;s re-election headquarters at the Prudential building, where inside, the deafening sound is a humming current \u2014 electrical and otherwise \u2014 that stays strong and properly directed. Last Thursday night, I was having a late drink with some friends at a steakhouse in downtown Chicago. When we were done, I walked out to hail a cab. The night was cool and breezy and there were a lot of guns on the street. There were two Chicago P.D. officers in the plaza outside the steakhouse, and they each had automatic rifles hanging down by the sides of their legs like some kind of lethal brace helping keep them upright. There were private security guards, carrying heavy on one side or another, stationed in front of a number of the office buildings, even though it was running toward midnight and the only other people on the sidewalk were the people who were sleeping there. Much of Chicago&amp;#039;s public artwork was covered in plywood, as though the city were packing up to move to Arizona or somewhere. It was the night before the day before NATO came to town, and Chicago was a silent, garrisoned city. I didn&amp;#039;t know at the time, but, at almost the same moment I was trying to find a cab, federal officers were preparing to bust three protesters on charges that the three men were planning to firebomb a number of locations in Chicago. On the surface, the three seemed to be another group of ne&amp;#039;er-do-well&amp;#039;s who brought their dreams of anarchist glory to another undercover cop, who promised to supply them with the wherewithal they would need for their blows against the empire. (While announcing the bust, the Cook County D.A. told the press that the trio already was armed with &amp;quot;a mortar, knives, and a hunting bow.&amp;quot;) It was just what the city needed to justify the garrison, particularly when the prosecutors and police pointed out that one of the prospective targets was the president&amp;#039;s campaign headquarters over in the Prudential Plaza, not far from the river. This caught my attention as well, since I&amp;#039;d visited the new headquarters myself on Friday. The Prudential Plaza is one of those buildings that runs the width of a block, so its lobby opens on parallel streets with the bank of elevators in the middle. I waited in the lobby for 10 minutes before somebody came downstairs to escort me to the headquarters itself. On one side of the bank of elevators, a yellow, accordion-like grate, much like the ones you use to keep toddlers from tumbling down the cellar stairs, was stretched across a short corridor leading to the doors on the opposite side. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s there for protesters,&amp;quot; said Steve, who&amp;#039;d come down to bring me upstairs. &amp;quot;A few of them tried to get upstairs yesterday.&amp;quot; The headquarters is on the third floor. To visit, guests have to surrender their driver&amp;#039;s licenses in exchange for a visitor&amp;#039;s tag at the front desk. The days of the storefront walk-in headquarters are as dead as the Whigs, and Steve was not even allowed to tell me how many local headquarters the campaign has around the country. Within the broad rooms is a very strange combination of a high-end frat house and a local Best Buy outlet. Over the field-organizing tables hang the state flags of the various regions of the country that the people beneath them are working. (The middle of the area has a very strong Big 10 feel.) Beneath the flags, young people \u2014 over 90 percent of whom are salaried to one extent or another \u2014 worked every possible mode of communication technology brought down from the mount by Messrs. Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg. LCD screens were hung every place somebody hadn&amp;#039;t hung a handmade sign cheering on the president, his wife, the country, or people who&amp;#039;d been aces at their jobs in one way or another the previous week. The room buzzed with a cacophony of beeps, bells, and amplified punditspeak. Actual human speech even was buried in there somewhere. It was like watching the Keebler elves working in a nuclear missile silo. This is the way campaign are these days. This is the way politics are these days. The Obama campaign pioneered many of the new techniques in 2008, when they were able to bring a one-term senator to the presidency all the way to the White House at least in part by using the new technologies to create new kinds of communities \u2014 real and virtual \u2014 that they could activate when they most needed them. There is something insulated about it, but it is not the kind of insulation whereby something is sealed away from the world. Instead, it is more like the insulation that you find on electric wires, the kind of thing that makes sure the current stays strong and properly directed, but which also makes sure that the electricity does not erupt in ways that cannot be controlled. That&amp;#039;s the most conspicuous element of the president&amp;#039;s re-election headquarters: the overwhelming impression of a place that serves two primary functions \u2014 to marshal power and to control it tightly. This is not a place that either engenders improvisation or anger or emotion, or seeks in anyway to turn them loose. That&amp;#039;s for the streets outside. If that energy can be channelled in ways the campaign can employ to what it perceives to be its policy goals \u2014 in other words, if it&amp;#039;s time for Joe Biden to go give another speech somewhere \u2014 so much the better.  Everything is garrisoned today. Everything is insulated the way that electric wires are insulated so that the power doesn&amp;#039;t go anywhere it&amp;#039;s not supposed to go. The country&amp;#039;s political process is encased in technology so as to make it as safe and regular as it can be, so that the people within it can feel comfortable in what they&amp;#039;re doing. It is not a contrivance. If it were, practically anyone would do it, and the Republican presidential primary field \u2014 to say nothing of the candidate it produced \u2014 is proof enough that that&amp;#039;s not the case. It is, for lack of a better world, a kind of manufactured evolution, politics learning the techniques of distancing itself from the people politics purports to serve in the same way that those people have learned to distance themselves from each other, primarily through the insulating effect of new technology. We have grown accustomed to guns on the street, First Amendment zones, elections as televised design contests or exercises in competing virtual realities. The Obama headquarters is neither a symptom of this, nor is it the cause. It is simply a creature of the country it seeks once again to lead. We live garrisoned lives, so why should our politics be any different? Any energy that cannot be filtered through the buzz of the headquarters is left downstairs, on the outside, behind the toddler gate that stretches across the hallway or, better yet, out on the sidewalk, where walk the men with guns. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a14164/obama-reelection-headquarters-chicago-9063249/>