The daylong protest that filed past his back door Sunday is unlikely to spur President Bush to back abortion rights.
And the rally on their front steps is unlikely to prompt the Republicans who control the House and Senate to halt their war on reproductive rights.
Still, the hundreds of thousands -- perhaps 1 million -- people from all over the country who flocked to the National Mall for the March for Women's Lives on Sunday could influence the direction of national policies.
But only if they follow up.
For all its accomplishments -- its enormity, its celebrities, its impressive showing among youth -- the largest abortion-rights march in history must linger beyond the day if it is to succeed. The slogans must be turned into action, the action into votes.
"Bush has made up his mind. Congress members have made up their minds," said Clyde Wilcox, a Georgetown University government professor and author of Between Two Absolutes: Public Opinion and the Politics of Abortion. "The goal of marches like this is to mobilize your own people to get them excited about the issue again, and to vote in November... . If this election is as close as people think it will be, then every little bit helps."
March leaders said Sunday's large showing might discourage policy-makers, and even Supreme Court justices, from tinkering with women's rights.
"The purpose of the march is to make this the third rail of politics so that politicians stop playing with our lives," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority.
"History has shown that politicians do take heed, Supreme Courts do take heed when people speak out and take action," added Kate Michelman, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. "I actually think it can have an impact on how aggressive the administration continues to be in restricting the right to choose."
Nevertheless, Michelman and other leaders of the seven organizations that sponsored the march said that their intent was primarily to mobilize their supporters rather than to prod their opponents.
"The goal of this march is to galvanize all of these people to stream back to their campuses and communities and begin organizing to stop these policies and make sure that women who support reproductive rights and the men who care are a political majority who can't be denied," said Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, during an interview at the march.
"This march," she said, "is the beginning."
More accurately, it is another beginning. Because, of course, abortion-rights supporters marched and protested more than three decades ago before the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973. But after the Roe v. Wade decision, the momentum shifted. Feminists turned their attention to other pressing issues, and conservative abortion foes moved in.
"For years, pro-choicers have been content to assume that the courts would do their work for them," said Dennis Goldford, a political scientist at Drake University. "What Roe did was spawn, not entirely spontaneously, a really grass-roots populist movement against abortion rights. They have built organizational power which is just immense. It may be anchored in the Catholic Church and evangelical churches, but it is immense. The pro-choicers haven't done this.
"Pro-choicers thought, 'OK, we won,' " he said. " 'We can move on to other things.' "
Starting with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, abortion opponents have been flexing their muscles at the polls, both at national and state levels. Historically, only a small percentage of voters pick candidates based on their positions on abortion. But of those who do, Goldford said, twice as many oppose abortion rights.
Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said that is, in part, because "they mobilize theirs better than we mobilize ours." Suburban women, for instance, split their vote between the Democratic and Republican parties even though more of them favor abortion rights, she said.
"They tend not to think abortion is threatened," Lake explained.
Meanwhile, unmarried women, who are overwhelmingly in favor of abortion rights, vote in very small percentages, she said. In 2000, 22 million unmarried women who were eligible to vote chose not to do so. "If unmarried women turned out at the statewide average, we would have won Florida by 63,000 votes" and Al Gore would be president, Lake said.
That's where the marchers come in. It's their job to encourage their friends and neighbors to vote, to tell them that a second Bush term could change the balance of power on the Supreme Court and that Roe could be history.
"If all we do is march today, that will not change the direction this country is headed under the leadership of this administration," Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton warned the marchers.
Even if they follow through, they will not be alone, abortion foes promise. "The more and more they scream about what a pro-lifer President Bush is, the more it's going to mobilize the pro-lifers," said Bill Murray, spokesman for the conservative Family Research Council. "If they scream that Roe v. Wade is going to be overturned, that's going to warm the hearts of pro-lifers."
Nevertheless, as Murray pointed out, abortion opponents rally every year -- on the January 22 anniversary of Roe. The March for Women's Lives was the first in support of abortion rights in a dozen years. Women's-rights and civil-rights advocates scheduled the march last summer, but it followed closely the enactment of laws that, for the first time, ban a particular form of abortion and give fetuses equal status with people.
Those actions and earlier Bush decisions that restricted health care for women overseas drew people such as Phyllis Belisle to the march.
"I had to stand up and be heard," said Belisle, 54, a recently laid-off corporate training manager who flew to the march from her San Diego home. "I've watched our rights erode from the moment Bush took office.
"I'm hoping this march is seen by people in the heartland, people who can't be here, people who feel they are alone," she said. "I'm hoping that it takes people to the polls in November to vote against Bush."
That, march leaders and political analysts said, will depend in large part on whether Belisle and others like her raise their voices at home as they did on the National Mall.
Jodi Enda covers politics and government from Washington. She previouslyreported on the White House, presidential elections, and Congress for KnightRidder Newspapers.
