Top Bush adviser Karl Rove, in leaked off-the-record comments this week, reportedly challenged the idea that a new protest movement is building in opposition to the Iraq war. He is said to have mocked Gold Star mom Cindy Sheehan as a "clown," and to have said something along the lines of, "There is no real antiwar movement."

Whether by intention or not, Rove's comments challenge Sheehan and protestors around the nation to prove him wrong this weekend when a huge antiwar rally is scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C., along with companion rallies in other cities, including one here on Saturday, September 24. It's a challenge Lynn Bradach, a Gold Star mom in Portland, is more than happy to try to meet—in fact, she has considered it her mission ever since her son Travis was killed in Karbala in 2003 ["Mourning in America," Eli Sanders, Sept 15].

Bradach is packing her bags, bringing along Travis's dog tags and three large pictures of her son—Travis in his military dress uniform, Travis in fatigues and a helmet in the battle zone, and Travis in civilian clothes with a huge smile on his face. And because she can't bear the alternative—a country that doesn't care—she's bringing her optimism to D.C.

"I think it will be monumental," she says. "I think it really will. This is going to be the beginning of getting something turned around."

Bradach was in Crawford, Texas, this summer for the widely covered emergence of the Gold Star mothers; she jumped a plane to Bush's vacation ranch not long after she heard of Sheehan's protest there. The standoff between the Gold Star moms and the president marked the arrival of the first visible antiwar movement since the war on Iraq began in 2003—or at least the arrival of the first antiwar movement that mainstream America couldn't dismiss as a bunch of unpatriotic radicals. Now, organizers of the D.C. action are hoping this weekend's march will prove that the Gold Star moms weren't, as some have suggested, just a flash-in-the-pan product of the pre-Katrina summer news doldrums.

Ever since Bush left his Texas ranch to deal with the hurricane fallout, Sheehan has been on a bus tour, heading slowly for Washington, D.C. and rallying support in cities small and large along the way. Two more buses carrying other mothers of soldiers killed in Iraq are doing the same, and in the meantime mothers like Bradach have been buying plane tickets, packing their bags, and heading for the airport. There are predictions that as many as 100,000 people may join them in the nation's capital.

Here in Seattle, members of the local chapter of ANSWER, one of the groups sponsoring the D.C. march, are preparing for a noontime rally and march on Saturday, starting at Westlake Plaza and timed to coincide with the D.C. action and similar protests in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Jane Cutter, the Seattle coordinator for ANSWER, said the group is expecting more than 1,000 people—nowhere near the approxiamtely 20,000 that turned out downtown on February 15, 2003, as part of the huge worldwide protests on the eve of the Iraq war, but still one of the larger local protests since the war began.

"There was a massive outpouring on February 15 here and around the world," Cutter said. "I think some people were demoralized that they couldn't prevent the war from happening. I think there was a feeling that we tried demonstrating and demonstrating didn't work." But two years later, she said, anger is starting to build again. And with disapproval of Bush's policies also growing among mainstream Americans, protest is once more starting to seem a viable course of action.

Bush's poll numbers, already sinking steadily since he began his second term, have dropped to record lows under the weight of his ineffectual Katrina response. Meanwhile, the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq is fast approaching 2,000, with more than 14,000 wounded. The cover of Time magazine this week asks, "Is It Too Late to Win the War?" All of this, protest organizers hope, is a sign that their moment has come. The problem before was that people were not listening; now, they hope, Americans are in the mood to hear dissenting voices on the war.

"I think they're ready," says Bradach. "I'm hoping with all my heart it's going to be big."

eli@thestranger.com