Crowd size controversies are as American as apple pie when it comes to major political events and protests. Let’s start by stipulating to that fact. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of quite these dimensions — where the reasonable and disinterested estimates (mid-to-high 5-figures) are so dramatically dwarfed by the fantasies of the organizers and participants (1.5 to 2 million).
There was event organizer Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, who announced to the crowd that ABC News had estimate the crowd size at 1 to 1.5 million — something that was totally false and a pained ABC News rushed to print with a denial of ever had said such a thing.
If you’ve never been to Washington before or a major political rally it’s probably really hard to get a sense of how big a crowd is. After all, even 50,000 is a lot of people. But a lot of the people there, certainly the organizers of the event, aren’t that wet behind the ears. Kibbe had to know that 1.5 million was 20 or 30 times as many people as were actually there. So I wonder how much of this wasn’t a deliberate effort to float patently absurd numbers which would then be knocked down by the media in order to whip up more fantasies of grievance, bias and oppression to the Tea Bag stew.
Over the weekend I noticed a lot of right-wing sites linking to a post comparing the amount of trash left behind by the allegedly equivalent sized crowd at the inauguration and the Tea Party protest. In itself it’s sort of the standard order partisan gotcha stuff that both sides do. But what struck me is that it’s only a meaningful gotcha for the home team if you actually believe there were like 20 or 30 times as many people there as there actually were.
Is it creation science creeping into innumeracy? In some ways it’s the best representation I’ve seen yet of the alternative universe some of these people are living in.
