New York, NY —

Monday is the day that UN weapons inspectors issue a crucial report on how their work is going in Iraq. Tuesday, President Bush gives his State of The Union Address, which he may use to make a case for war. But WNYC's Brian Lehrer says the president has a few skeptics to convince: most of the American people.


The White House folks aren't saying so, but I suspect they are getting worried about the new anti-war movement. If they're not, they should be.

By most media accounts, the Washington rally last Saturday was bigger than the one in October. That means something's up because it's hard to get tens or hundreds of thousands of people together once - no less twice in three months - unless your movement is growing.

Second, it had a much more mainstream attendance this time. More mainline denomination churches got into the act, for example.

Just as important, this is the first anti-war rally I can remember where participants were actually happy with the media coverage. Usually, protesters complain after a march that the networks either ignored them, or made them look like freaks. Not this time. The website of the group MoveOn.org even boasted that ABC used their anti-war ad to grill Donald Rumsfeld.

But the protesters are not the war hawks' biggest problem. It's those people watching at home. No less than four public opinion polls released in the last week show most non-protesting Americans want to give weapons inspections more time, do not support unilateral action, and do not feel they've been given real evidence of an Iraqi threat.

This is all consistent with a recurring problem the president is beginning to have with the American public that goes beyond Iraq: His to-do list is not the same as ours.

Americans - except for Charles Schwab - were not petitioning the government to abolish the tax on stock dividends. But that's what he proposed and he's now got to convince the rest of us that it's not class warfare. In the new polls, the idea registers as a dud.

No one is clamoring for the president to force Medicare recipients into HMOs to get prescription drug benefits. But Friday's newspapers say that's what he wants to do. There's plenty of health insurance reform we ARE asking for.

And it's the same with a war on Iraq. Americans are demanding a war against Al Quaeda - not a long-term occupation of Baghdad to prevent an unproven hypothetical threat. Maybe the president's overall approval rating has sunk into the 50s because his priorities are different from ours on one too many things. Should we call this leadership, or is he just out of touch?

So far, the White House folks are being more gracious to the anti-war protesters than to, say, Germany and France. All they say about the marchers is that Americans cherish their right to protest, and Iraqis should have that right too. But a little more positive protester press, and a few more points in the opinion polls, and the administration may shift into attack mode.

For the record, the umbrella organizer of the DC rallies, known as ANSWER, is vulnerable to attack. It's an offshoot of the unsavory Workers World Party, whose website, for example, denies that the Tiananmen Square massacre ever happened, and says if it did, the protesters provoked it - just slightly ironic as it leads the peace protests here. And leading anti-war rabbi Michael Lerner declined to speak at ANSWER's rally because they wouldn't let him make an anti-war, pro-Israel case. These people are not pro-democracy, and not pro-free speech.

But frankly, the rallying masses have no idea who the organizers are. They know the people in their towns who recruited them. And more and more, they know their friends and relatives in the reserves who are being called up to fight and they're not sure why.

WNYC's Brian Lehrer. You can hear his call-in show weekday mornings at 10 on 93.9 and am820 WNYC.