Rally Recipe Wins No Prizes

It was, as the saying goes, all good. The weather was great. The crowd was pissed but in a cheerful, spirited way. The Washington, DC cops, though fully in thrall to their Powellesque doctrine of completely unnecessary and overwhelming force, more or less just lined up in their cruisers, saddles, motorcycles, dirt bikes, bicycles and black boots and watched the proceedings. The A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition and United for Peace and Justice, the two organizers, had obviously mended fences after some squabbles earlier in the year, so that was nice.

In fact, except for its totally unfocused message and the fact that organizers missed a golden opportunity by not holding it three weeks earlier, the anti-war rally in Washington, DC on Saturday was a tremendous success.

At about 11:00 a.m., the rally's scheduled start, a festive but relaxed crowd of 5,000 or so gathered on the north side of the Washington Monument, ostensibly to register their disapproval of the Bush administration's handling of the war in Iraq. People were still streaming toward the site at that point; next-day estimates by media put the number of people who marched on the White House several hours later at 10,000 to 20,000 -- far closer to reality, by my lights, than the estimate of 100,000 claimed by some overenthused organizers at one point.

It is always good to see people fired up about something and doing something about that something; it's even better when that something is the Bush administration's voluminous catalog of misdeeds, missteps and misstatements of the truth. But if anyone -- a Democratic party strategist, let's say -- wanted to gain some understanding of the hurdles faced by the left between now and November 2004, this would have been the place to be. This is going to be a hard group to pull together into a viable force.

The first thing such an observer might have noticed is that the rally's message was an omnibus, diffuse expression of dissatisfaction on many fronts. While that is an important thing for a constituency to communicate, it fails as a strategy for making a coherent point engineered to ignite change, which is, I believe, what a rally is supposed to do. This was a cupboard casserole of a demonstration, something thrown together with whatever was on hand. The main ingredients were "end the occupation now" (mushroom soup),"Bush is a liar who should be impeached" (noodles) and "bring our troops home safely" (tuna fish). That is a fairly harmonious combination, one enhanced by "Dude, Where's My Country?" (salt) and "Osama bin forgotten" (pepper).

Unfortunately, other, less compatible, ingredients worked their way in: "support to the Palestinians" (beets), "no to the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas" (pickle relish) and "does your food have a face?" (Apple Jacks). These points of view were expounded both by speakers and by the placard-bearers in the crowd, to the detriment of the rally at large; worthy though each may be as an independent concern, their addition to the mix confused the message hopelessly and probably made it just a little too easy for anyone peering out the windows of the West Wing (not the president; he was in Camp David) to dismiss the whole crowd as a bunch of wackos.

Granted, a rally like this is tough to pull off. In the run-up to the war, it was easy to gather people for the no-invasion-of-Iraq cause. People's reasons for opposing the war didn't matter as much as the fact that they didn't want it and they poured out by the hundreds of thousands to say so. This was much trickier. Occupation is more abstract, and it doesn't come with the same package of grisly images that war does.

However, our fictitious political operative might have seized on another, more fundamental, problem than that the demonstration-as-casserole tasted weird. The real problem is that the base ingredient, the mushroom soup -- "end the occupation now" -- is basically void of the nutritional content that for the purposes of this argument could be called a savvy and intellectually rigorous position.