Can Lobbyists Stop the War?

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One weekday morning in mid-July, perhaps two dozen liberal organizers gathered around a conference table in an office building on Washington’s K Street. Their mission: American withdrawal from Iraq. In one sense, the location was unlikely; K Street is a symbolic address, like Madison Avenue or Fleet Street, in this case representing the capital’s thriving industry of trade associations and corporate lobbyists. Yet this was a group of mostly young progressives drawing meager salaries who had no ties to corporate America. Still, the venue was not inappropriate. Those arranged around the table represented the new face of the antiwar movement — now one of Washington’s most vigorous single-issue lobbies.

The purpose of the meeting was the daily conference call conducted by Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, a coalition of activists, policy outfits and labor unions brought together this year by MoveOn.org, the 3.4-million-member-strong liberal advocacy group, which was convinced that Democrats on Capitol Hill needed help to end the war. By the end of this month, Americans Against Escalation will have spent $12 million on a combination of grass-roots organizing, polling and television advertisements in order to get the United States out of Iraq.

Tom Matzzie, the group’s campaign manager, was in charge. Only 32 years old, Matzzie is a rising star of the resurgent progressive movement. Neither bohemian nor slick technocrat, Matzzie is an Italian-American who grew up in Mount Lebanon, a middle-class suburb of Pittsburgh. Apart from his attire — on this day, a pink dress shirt and pin-striped suit pants — he wouldn’t seem out of place at a Steelers tailgate party; he’s heavyset, bearded and his terse speech can have a gruff edge. He is also a sharp political analyst with a gift for spin and broad strategic thought. When I first met him he illustrated his idea of how to force Republicans to end the war by sketching into my notebook a diagram of something called Bernoulli’s principle, which describes the relationship between pressure and speed in the movement of fluids.

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While some antiwar groups have castigated Democrats for not pushing more boldly to end the war — as has A.A.E.I. at times — Matzzie’s strategy of late stresses Democratic unity and driving a wedge between Republicans and President Bush. This was the thinking behind A.A.E.I.’s “Iraq Summer,” a three-month campaign that focused on 40 Republicans in Congress in more than a dozen states, including prominent senators like the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, about whom A.A.E.I. ran television ads saying he had voted 15 times to support “Bush’s war.” As long as George Bush has a willingness to wield vetoes and stubborn allies in Congress to uphold them, Matzzie reasons, no legislation will get America out of Iraq. The war will only end, Matzzie told me, if a group of Republicans “walks down to the White House and says, ‘You have got to get us out of this mess.’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/magazine/09antiwar-t.html?hp