DENVER– “It was completely mystifying to me. I couldn’t tell what they were protesting about,” said the young downtown office worker who was sitting across from me on a light rail train. She was heading to her home in the suburbs of south Denver as she related her experience of watching a clash between police and protesters that sent scores of people to jail on the first night of the Democratic Convention. “It seems like they just wanted attention,” she concluded.

With the exception of a powerful 7,000-strong antiwar demonstration led by the Iraq Veterans Against the War, protests at the Democratic Convention were small and self-marginalizing. Both delegates and Denverites I spoke to throughout the week had no idea what the protests were about to the extent they were aware of them at all. The two main protest groups – Unconventional Action and Recreate ‘68 – did not have an easy task with the local police and media spreading scare stories for months and with Barack Obama and the Democrats widely perceived as a reforming alternative to eight years of Republican rule. However, there was little effort made to bridge the comprehension gap.

When several hundred masked anarchists paraded down the 16th St. pedestrian mall in downtown Denver on the day before the Convention started waving orange and black flags and chanting “Whose Streets? Our Streets!”, bystanders were simply baffled. As soon as the march veered onto a side street, it was cordoned off from both directions by police who unsuccessfully chased about 20 breakaway protesters into a six-story parking garage while allowing the rest to leave after a tense, half-hour standoff.This confrontation was promptly hailed as an exciting victory on the DNC Disruption 08 website. “The classic Whose Streets Ours Streets chant gained real meaning for the protesters as they reclaimed the parking lot, the streets and a sense of possibility that hints at the transforming power of a public in rage at the war and fueled with a sense of joy and liberation.”

The cat-and-mouse game continued the following night and would end in mass arrests.

Recreate ‘68 eschewed confrontational street tactics in favor of permitted marches emphasizing the struggles of oppressed peoples both inside the US and around the world. But with an enigmatic name (Which part of 1968 do we want to recreate—the assassinations, the race riots, the thrashing of antiwar protesters, the election of Richard Nixon?) and a laundry list of causes (Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Haiti, Venezuela, Mumia, Leonard Peltier, the Cuban 5, etc., etc.), their message was as impenetrable for the uninitiated as that of the anarchists who came across as having no message at all.

Historically, protest movements have served to dramatize injustice, galvanize a complacent populace, pressure intransigent politicians and recruit growing numbers of people into broad-based movements for social change. If the DNC protests were disappointing, spending the third night of the convention inside the Pepsi Center listening to the tired, vacuous speeches of Democratic Party hacks like Joe Biden, John Kerry and Madelaine Albright was enough to make me yearn for the honest anger of the protesters.

The “change we need” is much more than Obama has any intention of delivering. We need people to be constantly pushing the envelope of what’s considered possible. But, self-righteous posturing is self-defeating.

In the decade since the 1999 Seattle WTO demonstrations, radical protesters have developed the capacity for holding protest “convergences” that includes mobile soup kitchens, mobile street medics, teams of legal observers and I-Witness Video activists who document police brutality and independent media outlets like Indymedia that convey the protesters’ side of the story to other activists around the world.

While this is an impressive feat, events in Denver provided a reminder that creating a parallel universe dedicated to social protest is not enough in itself if its inhabitants are unwilling to engage with the larger society they seek to change.