CRAWFORD, Texas - For more than a year, a modest bungalow known as "Peace House," located a few miles from President Bush's ranch, has served as a headquarters for antiwar activists. It is lonely work, with little more than a skeleton crew on hand much of the time.

But then Cindy Sheehan hit town.

The 48-year-old mother of Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, who was killed in an ambush in Baghdad, Iraq, last year, is consumed by the kind of grief that turns into a furious determination to do something - in her case, to confront the president and force him to explain why her son died.

Now, in the space of just a few days, what started out as a seemingly quixotic personal mission has become something of a phenomenon - with media swarming around Sheehan, leading liberal and antiwar activists parachuting in to try to make her their long-sought voice, and political experts in both parties working to assess what role she may have in galvanizing the public's gathering unhappiness with the increasing American casualties in Iraq.

Antiwar leaders hope that putting the spotlight on Sheehan will motivate Americans who oppose the war, creating a political force strong enough to compel the Bush administration to change course.

President Bush said yesterday that he sympathizes with her loss but that agreeing to her demand to immediately withdraw troops "would be a mistake for the security of this country."

Speaking to reporters after meeting with members of his national security team, Bush said he has heard the voices of Sheehan and grieving family members who say the United States should leave Iraq because of the mounting death toll.

"I grieve for every death," Bush said. "It breaks my heart to think about a family weeping over the loss of a loved one. I understand the anguish that some feel about the death that takes place."

MoveOn.org and other liberal groups have rushed to provide support for Sheehan, offering media expertise and attempting to assemble a corps of others who have lost relatives in Iraq or have family members serving there.

Liberal voices have swung into action on the Internet as well. On Wednesday, Democratic media consultant Joe Trippi organized a conference call with Sheehan for bloggers, aiming to garner more publicity. By Wednesday afternoon, "Cindy Sheehan" was the top-ranked search term on Technorati.com, the search engine for blog postings.

Sheehan, a Vacaville resident who opposed the war even before her son's death, was a member of one such group in June 2004. She came away from that meeting dissatisfied and angry.

"We wanted (the president) to look at pictures of Casey, we wanted him to hear stories about Casey, and he wouldn't. He changed the subject every time we tried," Sheehan said. He wouldn't say Casey's name, called him: 'your loved one.'"

Sheehan, a co-founder of the anti-war group Gold Star Families for Peace, has said that she will remain in Crawford until she gets to see Bush face to face.

Until a sudden cloudburst forced her to move to Peace House early Wednesday morning, Sheehan had been camping in a tent along a road about two miles from Bush's Prairie Chapel Ranch. On Saturday, the day she arrived in Crawford, two senior White House aides -national security adviser Stephen Hadley and deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin - left the ranch to meet with her on a dusty road for 45 minutes.

That, she said, was not satisfactory.

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