Even A Bullet Can't Stop Him

Erik Martz on Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party run for President, and his near-assassination:

In October of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was about to give a speech in Milwaukee in support of his reelection campaign under the newly created Progressive “Bull Moose” Party when a bartender named John Flammang Schrank walked up and shot him in the chest. Roosevelt of course was not killed, but neither his survival nor Schrank’s claim that he was instructed by the ghost of William McKinley to prevent a third term for the two-term former president were the most extraordinary parts of the whole affair. It was the fact that Roosevelt decided to deliver his speech in the Milwaukee Auditorium anyway, for an hour and a half, with blood seeping through his clothes. “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible,” he began, “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” Reading a transcript of the speech is probably more comical than it should be, or than it would have been at the time. Having concluded from the fact that he wasn’t dead that the bullet had not penetrated any vital organs, Roosevelt spent the better part of the first half of his prepared remarks assuring the alarmed crowd and the various dignitaries and medical personnel pleading with him to leave the stage that he was not dying and in fact not much affected by the bullet wound. “Don’t pity me,” he said, “I am all right. I am all right, and you cannot escape listening to the speech either.”
The character named Teddy Roosevelt—the blustering, mustachioed bull moose caricature that posterity has given us—tends to shine through here. Only Teddy Bear the Rough Rider, the red-blooded man’s man, would have endured a gunshot wound to deliver a speech in which he somehow tied the attempt on his life to the Taft/Wilson Republican regime’s attempt to disavow worker’s rights and assassinate the former president’s character. Only the notoriously long-winded Teddy Bear would have been saved from death partially by the thickness of his speech manuscript, which was folded into his jacket pocket over his right breast where the bullet struck him. Only Teddy Bear, fiery activist and intimidating orator, would never let a bullet’s progress inhibit the chance for real social progress.
The image is a dream, of course, but it’s always been a compelling one, more so now because one can hardly imagine such a person existing, or such a thing occurring, in modern politics.

That is a nearly too-good-to-be-true story.  I would guess that a major figure attacking both political parties will be marginalized in today's more partisan media environment.  Too much of the political establishment is invested in his or her "team" winning, and somebody pointing out that both parties are corrupt damages that "team."