Such a constituency hasn't made itself heard yet, though. Four days after the protest -- and after five people staged a sit-in in Hillary Clinton's office while dozens chanted outside -- both of New York's senators supported a resolution granting George Bush broad authority to wage war in Iraq. Clinton's explanation -- that she was voting to give Bush power to wage unilateral war in the hope that "bipartisan support for this resolution makes success in the United Nations more likely, and therefore, war less likely " -- made her vote look like a nakedly political calculation.

Clearly organizers still have much to do to convince politicians that opposition to war with Iraq is more than a fringe phenomenon.

"I don't know that anything is really going to stop [the war]," says Jeremy Pikser, a Hollywood screenwriter ("Bulworth") who helped draft the Not In Our Name statement. "It would take masses of people really turning out. Instead of 40 people [protesting] outside Hillary Clinton's office, if there had been 15,000 she might have changed her vote."

Many groups continue to pop up, opposing a strike on Iraq -- and without the taint of the extreme fringe. Several prominent groups have taken out full-page ads in major newspapers to voice their fears about Bush's policies. While the Not In Our Name statement has received a lot of attention, more surprising, and perhaps more convincing, was the Sept. 26 ad taken out by 33 international relations scholars, leaders in their fields, who argued that "War With Iraq Is Not In America's National Interest." On Monday, the group Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities took out an ad whose signers included Dee Hock, the founder of Visa International, and Frank A. Butler, the retired president of Eastman (Kodak) Gelantine Corp. Its wording was harsh: "They're Selling War. We're Not Buying."

But these aren't groups the average concerned citizen can join. And finding one that offers an alternative to the hard left will be complicated. "It's much easier to promote a bumper sticker than complexity," Gitlin acknowledges. Besides, he says, "the liberals are disorganized and lack confidence. They're opposed to the war but genuinely frightened of weapons of mass destruction. I think we should go through the Security Council. I'm not inclined to go to a rally that seems to oversimplify."

Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the liberal Tikkun magazine, signed the Not In Our Name statement, but agrees that a serious movement can't be built on its organizers' ideology. "Any antiwar movement that's going to be successful is going to have to acknowledge the evil in Saddam Hussein and the legitimate fears people have about his misuse of weapons of war," he says. "Otherwise you're going to have just the lunatic fringe, people who hate America so much that they are unable to communicate with rest of the American population. That antiwar movement would be a sideshow."

As a step toward articulating that vision, Gitlin suggests a return to an original tool of the '60s activists -- the teach-in. "In recent years people have come to call a teach-in what is essentially a rally," he says. "The original teach-ins were predicated on a divergence of opinions. It wasn't just a matter of soapbox orating. The State Department was challenged to send people to debates, and they did. Defenders of the war were invited in. They weren't marginal left-wing operations." Instead of just regurgitating lefty boilerplate, he says, campus groups should be engaged in a serious discussion that includes people who may fear war -- but also fear the threat of Saddam. "Let the 'no blood for oil' people make their cases and let the realists make their case," he says.

The Central Park rally drew this kind of diverse crowd, which included Dennis Lockwood, a 57-year-old systems designer from Connecticut who works in "conservative corporate America." Lockwood's argument isn't radical -- he believes that Bush's plan to attack Iraq is an "irrational" response to Sept. 11 and that America should be "setting an example of rational action." Similarly, most of the thousands and thousands of people likely to flock to D.C. at the end of the month aren't going because they endorse the agenda of the International Action Center. They're going because they believe Bush is making the world a more dangerous place than it has to be.

Yet that simple point may be considerably overwhelmed at the Oct. 26 rally, just as it was in Central Park. That is, unless ordinary people can make themselves heard above the din of revolutionaries blind to all evil that doesn't emanate from here.

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