Inside a new anti-war campaign. Eleanor Clift, Newsweek.

Inside a New Antiwar Campaign
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek

Friday 03 August 2007

Inside the antiwar movement's effort to embarrass the GOP into changing its position on Iraq.

Remember President Bush's summer from hell? Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan had camped out in Crawford, Texas, igniting the nascent antiwar movement. Two years later, as Congress heads off on its August recess, antiwar activists are waging their Iraq Summer campaign. The idea: to bird-dog 40 lawmakers, all Republicans, much the way Sheehan did Bush.

Unlike Californian Sheehan, these protesters are homegrown. When Minnesota's Republican Sen. Norm Coleman looks out his picture window, he sees a sign directly across the street on his neighbor's lawn that says, SUPPORT THE TROOPS, END THE WAR. Coleman has spoken out against the war effort, but has yet to break with his party to join the Democrats in setting a timetable for withdrawal. He is one of 10 Republican senators on the target list for the campaign.

The proximity of the sign to the embattled senator's home in July became the backdrop for the neighbor's press conference, which ran on the local evening news. She was polite about her differences with Coleman, but she wanted folks to know where she stands. "It was all very Minnesota-nice," says Tara McGuinness of Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), a coalition of progressive and labor groups that united under the antiwar banner and is behind the Iraq Summer campaign. Their model is the Mississippi Summer Project, the 1964 effort that pushed for civil-rights legislation.

The campaign aims to push Republicans to take a stand on withdrawal, in defiance of Bush, whose approval rating specifically for his handling of the war is stuck at a miserable 24 percent, according to the NEWSWEEK Poll released today. Roughly two thirds (68 percent) of Americans thought taking military action against Iraq was the right thing to do in July 2003 (not long after Bush declared his "mission accomplished"). Today that number is roughly half that (35 percent). Only 16 percent of the public think the situation in Iraq is improving, while 41 percent think conditions are getting worse.

So Iraq War veterans on the AAEI payroll are confronting recalcitrant members of Congress about their ongoing support for the war. Tom Matzzie, AAEI's campaign manager, says he relishes these face-to-face contacts when "the target" gets the "hard ask" to take a stand to help end the war. Scenes of lawmakers evading protesters have become a staple on YouTube. Illinois Rep. Mark Kirk got a taste of the tactic when his aides barred a man wearing a sticker that says IRAQ WAR, WRONG WAY from a meeting in his home district. The man, an Iraqi War vet working with AAEI, waited outside as Kirk brushed by to duck into a waiting dark sedan. Kirk looks evasive dipping into the car while saying he won't talk to someone with the DCCC, which is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. All the while, the video camera is rolling.

These tactics are having an effect. When grassroots canvassers were in the Kentucky neighborhood of Senate leader Mitch McConnell, the Capitol police who protect him wherever he goes asked how long they planned to be there. Suspecting that McConnell didn't want to venture out until they were gone, they stayed well into the evening in what turned out to be a nine-hour vigil. Counter protesters showed up but left after an hour. McConnell ended up switching his flight back to Washington because of the bird-dogging. And this was after he declared on one of the Sunday shows that the vast majority of people in his state support the war effort. "Not in his neighborhood," says Matzzie.

Admittedly, this is small-bore stuff that doesn't make it onto the radar in Washington. But it's unfolding in real time on the Internet and it's just annoying enough that it might make a difference. The targeted Republicans have all changed their tune about Iraq; they just haven't adjusted their votes. "We see the softening of their rhetoric as movement, and now we have to tip them over the edge," says Matzzie. AAEI has a paid staff of 130 and a budget that has ballooned to $12 million, a quarter of which was raised online, with MoveOn.org a principle underwriter. Internet donations spike when things look the bleakest in Washington, says Matzzie. "People at the grassroots say we just have to work harder, we have to double down. People really care a lot."

Back in Minnesota, Coleman, who is up for re-election in 2008, is certainly feeling the heat. His poll ratings are anemic. He faces a challenge in the Republican primary and potentially a race against the comedian Al Franken, a Minnesota native who's returned home to challenge the Brooklyn-born Coleman. If the AAEI tactics succeed, Coleman should be carrying enough bruises from the brutal coverage that he'll be ready to take more than baby steps away from Bush. And he may not be the only Republican to decide that he cares about his party's position on Iraq, but not quite as much as his own political survival.