-Why is this some either-or choice? A rally is a one-day event, that, -if large enough, has the potential to scare the ruling class. -But I don't see why the large demo is obsolete.
Frankly, if you want to scare the ruling class politicians, canvass in their neighborhoods where they need to get elected. That's far scarier than any march in DC. I remember when we just collected letters going door to door on the issue. We literally could change state legislators votes with fifty letters in some cases, since a hand written letter from a few folks combined with knowledge that we had talked about the issue to everyone else in the district was enought o scare the crap out of any politician.
I do think the promiscuous use of rallies is obsolete and should be reserved for when the numbers are large enough to be impressive. On a national issue a la a DC march, anything less than 2-300,000 elicits little more than a shrug at this point. A march of less than 50,000, as is likely to happen on April 20th won't scare the ruling class at all; in fact, it will warm their heart with its pathetic smallness.
I decent rule of thumb is that if you can't mobilize at least 0.1% (1 in 1000) of the population effected by the issue, don't bother. In a small city issue, a rally of a few hundred people is impressive, but on the national level issue of the war, these tiny rallies are just worse than useless.
Mass civil disobediance is a separate issue and a smaller percentage being arrested does have impact, especially when targetting an issue people know little about so it draws attention to it. This is one reason Seattle was so effective.
Also unusual and unexpected people participating in a rally can make it more useful-- thus the "Teamsters and turtles" together theme of Seattle.
But demos by themselves don't threaten either the votes or money politicians need to be elected, so why should anyone be threatened by them? Rallies are media events and little more, and as such they are only as useful as the message conveyed to the public. And given the work of getting tens of thousands of people to DC, the message could be far better conveyed with less media bias through direct door-to-door knocking.
-- Nathan Newman