Challenge at Chicago Summit: Recruiting Protesters The stage seemed set for a showdown: G-8 and NATO leaders planned to hold back-to-back summits in Chicago that activists predicted could draw tens of thousands of people protesting everything from war and poverty to unemployment and education cuts. But at the last minute, President Barack Obama moved the Group of 8 economic meeting to Camp David, the secluded presidential retreat in rural Maryland, where demonstrators will be kept far away. Chicago kept the NATO meeting, which will focus on the war in Afghanistan and other international security matters, not the economy. That left activists with a new challenge: persuading groups as diverse as teachers, nurses and union laborers to show up anyway for a cause that might not align with their most heart-felt issues. "Our fear was that (they) would not march with us because their agenda was primarily economic," said Joe Iosbaker, a Chicago anti-war activist and member of the Coalition Against NATO/G8 War & Poverty Agenda. He said protest organizers have been working to link U.S. war spending to economic cuts at home to pump up turnout. The message, he said, is "starting to sink in: NATO is the armed wing of the 1 percent, (and) there is a war on the poor to serve the wars (elsewhere)." Even so, the protests are almost sure to be smaller and less dramatic than originally expected, experts said. FILE - In this Nov. 20, 2010 file photo, police arrest a protestor during a demonstration at the last NATO Summit that was held in Lisbon, Portugal. Those planning the protests when the NATO Summit comes to Chicago, May 20-21, 2012, hope to draw big crowds to the city by linking U.S. spending on war to economic troubles at home. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano, File) Close If the G-8 and NATO had been held as originally planned, many people envisioned massive, street-filling protests drawing people from all over the U.S., including many from the Occupy movement. But NATO is seen by most Americans as "something useful," even though it faces significant opposition in Europe, said Luis Fernandez, a sociology professor at Northern Arizona University who studies protests. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is an alliance of the U.S. and European countries originally formed to counter the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It has since branched out to protect wider Western interests. The G-8 summit "would have brought more protesters and more anger because you could raise up the flag of the social class," said Dominic Pacyga, a Columbia College history professor who has written a book about Chicago. That's not so easy with the NATO summit, where 50 heads of state will discuss issues such as the campaign to replace the late Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and European missile defense. But there's still a lot at stake in Chicago. For protesters, it's a chance to capitalize on the international media coverage the summit will draw. For Obama and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, it's an opportunity to showcase their town as a global city. And they don't want to be embarrassed if the protests turn violent, police overreact or something else goes wrong, especially in a presidential-election year. This will be the first time the U.S. has hosted the NATO summit outside of the nation's capital. During the last U.S. summit, in 1999, several thousand Serbian Americans demonstrated peacefully against NATO bombings in Yugoslavia. That same year, the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle drew an estimated 50,000 protesters for demonstrations that erupted in clashes with police. Obama said he moved the G-8 so he could meet with leaders in a more intimate setting than Chicago's cavernous McCormick Place convention center, but most observers believe the threat of protests played a role, too.