The United for Peace and Justice march in New York yesterday, the largest of the protests planned for the week of the Republican national convention, was nothing if not a forum for creativity. From signs reading “George W. Bush: Worse than Rod Stewart” to an inflatable pink “corporate” pig floating over Seventh Avenue (looking more larval than porcine), New York's creative partisans turned out in force.
There was the “Republican Freakshow,” with performers dressed in Ku Klux Klan outfits, wearing John Ashcroft facial masks and holding signs reading “Ashcroft the Grand Cyclops.” There was Donald Rumsfeld with frilly gills, “the Creature of Abu Ghraib.”
Jane Dorsey, 11, and her middle-schooler friend Eve Sappol, 10, made a sign together with Bush's face on Paris Hilton's body. Says Eve, “We made a lot of political montages.”
The Progressive Tourism Bureau handed out water amid cries of “free doughnuts, democracy.” There were “Asses of Evil” T-shirts, with the faces of Bush, Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, and “I [Splat] Bush” T-shirts, instead of “I [Heart] Bush,” which creator and artist-actor-photo designer Lisa Sauber described as “sort of an expressionistic, emotional, Pollock-type thing.”
“The amount of activities and protest that has been sparked by the [convention] is so remarkable, this is no longer a political response -- it's a cultural phenomenon,” said march organizer and attorney William Dobbs.
But to what end?
One of the main difference between the Democratic and Republican parties is that Democratic Party activists are overwhelmingly issue advocates or grass-roots organizers, such as those who spent a year planning the largest march New York has seen in decades, while Republican activists are much more comfortable with partisan activities whose sole goal is to humiliate or undermine the other side, especially electorally. The members of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are organized like a political institution, a “527,” but what they're doing is little more than an activist political stunt. Instead of marching down Fifth Avenue chanting obscene rhymes against the president, they worked their magic through formal political channels in a way that advanced their candidate in the states that will decide the election.
After the march I headed south to an event at City Hall, to see what the Democrats had to say on the one day this week that wasn't yet wholly focused on the Republicans. Finding myself with some time to kill, I wandered over the World Trade Center site. I hadn't been there in a long time.
Near Gate 7, there was a shrine, an informal memorial like those that sprouted up across the city in the days following the September 11 attacks, where strangers posted dot-matrix-printer photos of the old towers, hung small flags, and pasted handwritten notes. A child's crayon drawing was the instantly disarming center of the haphazard installation, a view of the two buildings as fraternal twins, drawn in different tones of blue and gray. The first was labeled “World Trade Center.” The other was labeled, with poignant childish confusion, the “Twin Tower” and colored with darker strokes.
In many ways, the protests were like this little atavistic shrine writ large, full of creativity without strategic object, just overwhelming feeling demanding idiosyncratic expression. For many of the protesters, it wasn't about making an intervention in electoral politics per se, even though opposition to the president was their primary motivating force. Yet the T- shirts and slogans and carefully constructed banners and paintings and floats were driven also by a less sophisticated and basic human impulse: to create public and shared expressions of sentiment. “There's so many people out here we're grateful to know, so many people want a change,” said marcher Eileen Fox, 56, of New Rochelle, who works as a funeral director in the Bronx.
Somewhere between a hundred thousand and a half-million people came out to protest Bush, the war in Iraq, and the convention itself. And the giant mass of them gave each participant more political voice, at a more opportune moment, than the Democratic Party itself could muster.
Joanna Windham, 55, came all the way from Dallas to be the spokeswoman for the “Thousand Coffin March” and “to show the American people what the administration is trying to hide: the caskets of our soldiers.”
It's easy for armchair quarterbacks to say that protesters like her would be more effective working in their local communities or in battleground states, and perhaps they would be. But Windham's group of coffins also created the major visual for newspaper coverage of the march, giving her loosely organized peers a one-day news cycle and much more public attention than the organized and official Democrats got with their kickoff press event at City Hall pushing back against the Republican convention.
Besides, the official Democrats don't always know what to do with their agitated anti-Bush supporters, says one marcher who is also active in Kerry-campaign organizing and so asked to remain anonymous.
“The non-campaign people are doing all we can to critique Bush and get him out, but the campaign is not helping us out,” the marcher complained, holding a banner aloft. “The campaign -- I don't think they really effectively use that energy, that frustration that exists among people. … We need to be a little bit more complementary of each other, but I don't know what that would look like.”
Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Terry McAuliffe, in fact, last week expressly denied any connection with or responsibility for the protesters, no doubt thinking strategically about how any misbehavior on their part would be used by Republicans to tar Kerry. But there is a role here for untutored voices, too, and it would seem that the Democrats could make better strategic use of them. The emotional, individual testimony of “real people” brings issues home to listeners in ways that simple facts and arguments often can't.
After the protests, the City Hall rally was the last stop on a six-day, five-state “America Can Do Better” DNC-led tour of battleground states. Perhaps because of the protest and the many Republican events -- and perhaps because the protest was in the works for a year while the Democratic pushback operation for the convention just came together in the past few weeks -- there was very little in the way of press there.
Senator Chuck Schumer, Representative Anthony Weiner, New York City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, and others all spoke. There was the obligatory Kerry-campaign-style appearance by a Vietnam veteran and a firefighter, the message of the day --“Mission Not Accomplished” -- coming through loud and clear in a call and response led by Schumer. The real people, identifiably from out of town with their puffy hairdos and greater girth, stood largely silent in the background, partisan T-shirts awkwardly covering their clothes. By the time Nita Martin of Philadelphia took the microphone an hour into the program, only one TV camera was left.
Martin, a registered Republican, spoke with force and clarity about her two sons, both Marines, and how one “had to go shopping on the Internet” for a helmet to protect himself from bullets and shrapnel before heading to Iraq because the one he was issued wouldn't do it. After all the talk in slogans and sound bites -- “America can do better; America must do better; America will do better!” -- it was a relief to hear someone not just say, “This election is the most important of my lifetime,” but sound, like the demonstrators, as though she actually felt it.
Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor.
