Vacaville resident Cindy Sheehan camped out near President Bush's vacation ranch in Crawford, Texas, in the hope of inspiring a national conversation about the war.

Her plea for Bush to explain what "noble cause" her son Casey died for in Iraq last year also has inspired a national conversation about Sheehan. And her name has become shorthand for what people think of the war.

Sheehan has been called everything from a "kook" to an anti-Semite by conservative bloggers and pundits over the past few days. But it's clear her message is reaching new audiences.

More than 1,500 "support Cindy" vigils were held nationally Wednesday evening. More than 400 people gathered in a park in the Contra Costa County suburb of Pleasant Hill, which has never been considered a hotbed of political activism. Many carried signs reading, "Right on, Cindy!" and "Meet with Cindy."

Like other women who attended the event, Nicole Delp, a 32-year-old Alamo resident, said the vigil was the first war-related demonstration she had ever attended.

"I can absolutely relate to her as a mom," said Delp, who said she was moved by images of a grieving mother who has not been acknowledged by Bush. "We came out because we are just tired of (troops dying). We want to bring the troops home."

A Wednesday e-mail from Not In Our Name, a liberal antiwar organization, included a rare suburban reference: "Volunteers, artist(s), vets and soccer moms" are invited to its 24-hour pro-Sheehan vigil Saturday in San Francisco.

Whether one supports Sheehan's position or not, she put the war back on the front pages in the middle of August and brought the war home to suburbia in a way other antiwar organizers hadn't been able to do.

"Whenever people have talked about the war, they've talked about body counts, and after a while, people have grown numb to that," said Joseph Tuman, professor of political communications at San Francisco State University. "There's always been a real struggle in this country over the questions, 'Should we be in Iraq?' and 'How long should we be there?'

"She has made it OK to have these conversations, as they're now about her, " Tuman said. "She's given people a way to talk about the war again."

But the backlash from conservative circles, where public criticism during wartime isn't socially acceptable, intensified this week.

As Sheehan supporters gathered at vigils Wednesday, Deborah Johns of Roseville was in Sacramento filming an anti-Sheehan commercial.

"I'm here to tell you that military families support our troops AND their mission -- in spite of what people like Cindy Sheehan say," Johns says in the ad, according to an advance script reviewed by The Chronicle. Her son William, a Marine who has served two tours in Iraq, is stationed in Florida.

"Cindy Sheehan certainly doesn't speak for me, our military families or our men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan," Johns says in the ad.

Republican strategist Sal Russo produced the ad, and a spokesman for his consulting firm expects it to begin airing on CNN and Fox News within a week. And Johns will lead a caravan, dubbed "You Don't Speak for Me, Cindy," that departs San Francisco on Monday for Crawford. That effort is organized by talk- show host Melanie Morgan of San Francisco's KSFO-AM.

Supporters of the counter-Sheehan caravan have started selling T-shirts that say, "Unlike some people ... I do support our troops in Iraq tour."

Johns and other Bush supporters, pointing to the many prominent liberals who have praised Sheehan, say she is being used. But Johns said her support by the GOP doesn't make her feel used.

"I made my son a vow (before his second tour of Iraq last year) to get out their positive stories that are happening in Iraq," Johns told The Chronicle on Wednesday. "And if Sal Russo and the Republicans are going to help get that message out, well, that's OK."

The pundit class has piled on Sheehan in recent days. Making the blogosphere rounds is a letter Sheehan allegedly wrote to a producer of ABC's Nightline show that said her son died for a war to protect Israel. In her online diary Tuesday, Sheehan wrote, "I never said that. I never wrote that." She also has been criticized for saying she will refuse to pay federal taxes. Sheehan said she hopes to be prosecuted on tax charges so she can use the publicity to put the war on trial.

That has not gone over well in red-state America.

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh compared her to Bill Burkett, a former Texas Air National Guard official who was the primary source of a CBS News story last year raising questions about Bush's military service. CBS later apologized for the story and acknowledged that they were "deliberately misled" with apparently forged documents.

"I mean, Cindy Sheehan is just Bill Burkett," Limbaugh said Monday on his nationally syndicated show. "Her story is nothing more than forged documents. There's nothing about it that's real, including the mainstream media's glomming onto it. It's not real. It's the latest effort made by the coordinated left."

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly said in an online commentary Wednesday that Sheehan "is associating with the most radical elements in this country, no doubt about it.

"Some Americans who also lost loved ones in Iraq do indeed consider the woman's conduct treasonous," he said. "Now, we respect dissent, but we don't have time for extremism. If you want to take Cindy Sheehan seriously, knock yourself out."

On MSNBC Tuesday, conservative commentator David Horowitz said: "It's very hard to have respect for a woman who exploits the death of her own son and doesn't respect her own son's life. This young man volunteered twice. This is not a draftee. This is somebody who volunteered, did a tour of four years and volunteered back for Iraq, and volunteered for the specific mission."

Sheehan has fought back on some fronts but says she expected some of the backlash. And it is worth tolerating, she said, if it stops the war.

"I put myself out there, and I'm willing to take it," Sheehan said this week in a conference call with reporters. "But I think the focus has been on the messenger and not the message.

"I find it ironic that some of these people scrutinize everything I said, but they don't scrutinize everything that George Bush has said," she said.

Michael Nagler, founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at UC Berkeley, said the intense focus on Sheehan hasn't hurt the movement yet.

"That's the danger when the message has been neglected for so long -- people grab hold of an icon and then all the attention goes to it, and the message can become lost," said Nagler, who has been at the forefront of the anti-war movement since the early 1960s.

"But there was no other way to break through the denial and anesthesia around Iraq than to grab hold of a person," he said. "The question is now, 'How do we move forward?' "

Sheehan has said she wants to turn the spotlight over to other military parents who are heading to Crawford or planning other vigils.

Nadia McCaffrey, a Tracy resident who received national attention when she invited the media to photograph the return of her son's flag-draped coffin, is among those headed to Texas.

Her son, Army Sgt. Patrick Ryan McCaffrey, who was killed in an ambush in Iraq in June 2004, was 34 and had two children. The Department of Defense's ban on photographs of coffins didn't apply to his coffin because it was landing at Sacramento International Airport on a commercial flight.

"It's difficult for many military families to speak out because you're seen as being unpatriotic," said Judith Ross, who belongs to Military Families Speak Out Bay Area and has known Sheehan for more than a year.

Her son, whose name she declined to give, is in the Marine Reserves.

"But people are so tired from the rhetoric on the right and the left that what Cindy is doing resonates with them," Ross said. "And she's fearless about it. I don't know if I could stand up to the scrutiny the way she has."

© 2005 San Francisco Chronicle

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