CRAWFORD, Texas For more than a year, a modest bungalow known as "Peace House," located a few miles from President Bush's ranch, has served as a headquarters for antiwar activists. It is lonely work, with little more than a skeleton crew on hand much of the time.
But then Cindy Sheehan hit town.
The 48-year-old mother of Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, who was killed in an ambush in Baghdad last year, is consumed by the kind of grief that turns into a furious determination to do something in her case, to confront the president and force him to explain why her son died.
Now, in the space of just a few days, what started out as a seemingly quixotic personal mission has become something of a phenomenon with media swarming around Sheehan, leading liberal and antiwar activists parachuting in to try to make her their long-sought voice, and political experts in both parties working to assess what role she may have in galvanizing the public's gathering unhappiness with the increasing American casualties in Iraq.
Antiwar leaders hope that putting the spotlight on Sheehan will motivate Americans who oppose the war, creating a political force strong enough to compel the Bush administration to change course.
MoveOn.org and other liberal groups have rushed to provide support, offering media expertise and attempting to assemble a corps of others who have lost relatives in Iraq or have family members serving there.
Liberal voices have swung into action on the Internet as well. On Wednesday, Democratic media consultant Joe Trippi organized a conference call with Sheehan for bloggers, aiming to garner more publicity. By Wednesday afternoon, "Cindy Sheehan" was the top-ranked search term on Technorati.com, the search engine for blog postings....
For the moment however, the personal nature of Sheehan's protest with its edge of raw emotion and the concentration of news media staked out in Crawford, where Bush is spending much of August, have combined to raise her voice above the crowd.
"Anything that focuses media and public attention on Iraq war casualties day after day particularly [something] that is a good visual for television, like a weeping Gold Star mother is a really bad thing for President Bush and his administration," said independent political analyst Charlie Cook.
Americans get a little numb by the numbers of war casualties, but when faces, names and families are added, it has a much greater effect," he said.
"Cindy Sheehan has tapped into a latent but fervent feeling among some in this country who would prefer that we not engage our troops in Iraq," said Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway, president of the Polling Company, based in Washington.
"She can tap into what has been an astonishingly silent minority since the end of last year's presidential contest. It will capture attention."
But other analysts predicted that Sheehan would soon fade from the scene.
"The president has an Iraq problem, but I don't think it's much worsened by Mrs. Sheehan," said professor Stephen Hess of George Washington University. "One Gold Star mother is a sympathetic figure, but collectively as Gold Star Families for Peace she is a movement and, as such, can be countered by a countermovement.
"I think the president might have defused the situation if he had invited her in instantly," Hess said, predicting that GOP strategists would soon mount a counterattack.
