December 22nd 2008
The Half-As-Popular Prez-Elect
Talk about news that’s greeted with a complete and utter lack of surprise:
Inauguration Day Crowd Estimate Reduced By Half
Officials are casting doubt on an early projection that 4 million to 5 million people could jam downtown Washington on Inauguration Day, saying it is more likely that the crowd will be about half that size.
D.C. authorities said the earlier estimates, provided by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), were based on speculation surrounding the historic nature of the swearing-in of Barack Obama as the nation’s first African American president. After weeks of checking with charter bus companies, airlines and other sources, they’re reassessing.
And some were even more optimistic than five million:
Jawauna Greene, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Transit Administration, said that inaugural planning committees had initially considered up to 6 million attendees. Lately, she said, D.C. officials had scaled back their estimates to about 2 million.
Why the downturn in the projections? The only explanations WaPo offers up in its article on the subject are fear of traffic jams and the possibility of cold weather.
Could it also be that his largely moderate choices for senior leadership have turned off his more radical supporters? Or that the Blagojevich slime has dulled the golden boy’s man’s (error caught by Racist-Katcher) image a bit already?
Or most likely of all, that the Inside-the-Beltway people and media that first prognosticated the huge numbers have realized that their view of things doesn’t exactly line up with the rest of the country’s?
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December 31st, 2008 at 8:49 pm
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