The difficulty of determining how many people saw the inauguration of Barack Obama

_{A lot of people came to watch the Barack Obama inaugural, but how many?
PAT BENIC / POOL}

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
by Chad Rubel

So how many people showed up to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama?

There are a lot of answers to the one question, but no clear idea how many there were.

The standard marker was Lyndon Johnson's inaugural, thought to be the record at 1.2 million. But there also seems to be the idea that "back in the old days," counts were legitimate and now counts are political fodder.

Were there a million people in the "Million Man March" in 1995? Estimates varied from 400,000 to more than 1 million. Then again, was that the only point?

We have seen countless portrayals in the MSM, degrading the Iraq War protests to not being at the same level of Vietnam War protests. Then again, we've seen the MSM downplay the numbers from those Iraq War protests.

There seems to be this generational element at work once again over whether the Obama inaugural crowd was bigger.

If you were in Washington and you had a ticket and were denied entry, and at least anecdotally, there were a lot of you, your impression of the crowd would be distinctly different.

The general impression is that there were over a million people taking in the Obama inaugural. Yet, no official or mainstream official count will cross that magical 1.2 million mark from LBJ's inaugural.

Let's break this down a bit. Washington's Metro subway service was expecting huge crowds, and there were warnings that Metro might be too crowded. Yet Metrorail had logged in 545,000 passengers before noon on Tuesday. One of the subway lines shut down around 9:30 a.m. and again it was reported that many of those stuck chose to avoid the Metro and walk.

For those who don't live in areas where walking is prevalent, the idea of walking several miles to an event might seem highly unusual. But for those in big cities, in situations of good stress or bad stress, walking gets done. Ask some New Yorkers how far they walked on September 11, 2001, and you might be surprised at the answers. And when the situation is happy, you'd be surprised how much you can walk.

So you have people who were warned not to take the Metro and found other ways of getting there. And Metro is reporting that several hundred thousand people did use their service.

But the crowds for Obama during the campaign had an amazing power all their own. Obama filled up the basketball arena in Seattle and had an overflow crowd watching on video screens. Then there was the stop in Portland, Oregon where the estimates of 75,000 were met with skepticism based on the space where the speech was given.

As you can see in the pictures from that speech, you could fit that many people if they are so like-minded. Having seen the grassy knolls in Portland and having been in Grant Park in Chicago on Election Night, the Obama crowds are like-minded enough to try and get as many people as possible into a space.

After the controversy over the count of the Million Man March, the National Park Service stopped giving official estimates of crowd size. However, Park service spokesman David Barna said the agency probably would produce a number this year. The number is expected later this week.

Unfair or not, there is a perception that the youth of today aren't as committed as the young people 40 years ago. But some of that stems from not giving credit where credit is due. If indeed the National Park Service declares that the crowd for the Obama inaugural sets a new record, then the young people of this generation should get the credit for being committed to the historical change and transition accomplished on the steps of the Capitol on Tuesday.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

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