The controversy over crowd-size estimates for Washington
political rallies dates back to Louis Farrakhan's
"Million Man March" in 1995. The attendance at the Farrakhan
event was clearly less than advertised. However, when
the National Park Service accurately reported that it was in
fact a Several Hundred Thousand Man March, this led
to accusations of racism which effectively put an end to
official NPS estimates. The subsequent 1997
Promise Keepers rally -- which was indisputably
larger than the Farrakhan event -- thus was not officially
estimated because, as a CNN writer delicately put it, the NPS had
been "stung by past disputes."
Given that I was one of the first to provide a definite
crowd-size number for Saturday's 9/12 March On D.C. -- a "people
meter" count of 450,000 for the morning march along
Pennsylvania Avenue -- I have been both amused and annoyed by
subsequent
rangling over estimates of the total crowd for the event
organized by FreedomWorks and co-sponsored by several
other free-market groups.
Even David
Weigel of the Washington Independent (no fan of
Republicans) writes that Saturday's rally "was the largest
march on Washington by conservatives in anyone's memory" --
although I don't think even the sponsors
would claim it was as large as the Promise Keepers event.
At any rate, many liberal bloggers have attacked
Michelle Malkin and others for giving credence
to high-end estimates of Saturday's crowd as high as 2
million. It is difficult to judge such things from TV coverage or
photographs, and if the 2 million number was high -- well, whose
fault is it that the NPS no longer provides official
estimates any more?
If the count of marchers on Pennsylvania Avenue (450,000) is
accepted as the rock-bottom estimate, and late arrrivals
significantly swelled the crowd above that, then a total
attendance above 1 million is certainly possible. Two million is
almost certainly too high.
Having
covered the rally in person, and having seen the view of
the crowd from backstage at the top of Capitol
Hill, I can now state that The Official Stacy McCain
Estimate of the crowd is: "Freaking
huge."
That's official. No arguing allowed.
