Far From The Maddening Crowd

From Bloomberg this weekend: McCain-Palin Crowd-Size Estimates Not Backed by Officials.

I'm not one to hyper-ventilate about polling with so many media cycles left to churn before the election, but I must admit that recent reports about just how large and enthusiastic those Palin crowds have been kind of made me a tad, well, apprehensive.

Well guess what-- they weren't so big. The numbers were lies.

Bloomberg reports this: the McCain camp tells the press, "Hey we have 10,000 people here. The Secret Service confirmed it." Or they say, "Hey, the Fire Marshall says we have 23,000 in the crowd." Those numbers get reported. People like us read those numbers and think, geeze, that's impressive.

The catch? "We didn't provide any numbers to the campaign" says the Secret Service. That Fire Marshall? He says "his office did not supply that number to the campaign and could not confirm it." That 23,000 crowd? Most reporters attending estimated it was 8,000.

Still a big crowd, but that's not rounding up you can believe in.

The lie annoys me. What bothers me more is that I took the numbers for truth (and so did the breathless, gutless media) and operated accordingly. Those numbers made me uneasy about Democratic enthusiasm. It did not cross my mind to doubt them. We can argue whether it is good or bad that I still live in world where I figure, heck, why would the campaign lie about something so objective and so easily confirmed?

The GOP ticket in 2008 will lie about anything and everything.

I've been counseling others to take a deep breath about the media hype right now. The local Obama office in L.A. I visited this weekend was packed and had awesome energy. Obama is back up by 3 points in Research 2000 today. He is inching up with Gallup. The state polls are in flux, and will be in flux. Obama raised $66 million in August. His crowd in New Hampshire this weekend was solid. The Obama camp says about 7000 showed up. And unlike the Republicans, you can believe a Democrat.