TO FLOURISH in public life requires a thick skin. Senator Ted Cruz needed one this week, as chanting activists hounded the senator and his wife from dinner in a Washington restaurant. Such disruption of politicians' meals is getting almost as common as online abuse. Ruqaiyah Morris, Vermont's only black state legislator, has said that she is quitting after suffering too many racist, "inflammatory and at times, even dangerous" harangues. Harsh words are tolerable, reckons an ex-politi-cian in Chicago: credible death threats, or thrown rocks and bottles, are not.
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