Is the McCain Campaign Lying About Crowd Estimates?

Mon, September 15, 2008 - 10:35 AM

There's no doubt that McCain campaign rallies have grown with Sarah Palin has joined the ticket. The larger crowds are one measure the media have used to show how fired up conservatives have become about the election. The argument: before Palin, many were going to stay home on Election Day, but the larger crowds suggest otherwise. The evidence: Palin-McCain rallies now pack in as many people as Obama's.

Except for, it turns out, the evidence is not true.

After a week in which pretty much every media organization in the country documented falsehood after falsehood in McCain's attack ads, it turns out the campaign is also lying about the number of people attending its rallies, Bloomberg News reports.

For example, the McCain campaign told reporters that 23,000 people attended a campaign rally in Fairfax last week. We had reporters on hand who estimated the crowd to be less than 10,000, as did the Washington Post. The McCain campaign attributed the 23,000 number to a city fire marshal.

The truth, from Bloomberg. "Fairfax City Fire Marshal Andrew Wilson said his office did not supply that number to the campaign and could not confirm it. Wilson, in an interview, said the fire department does not monitor attendance at outdoor events."

And it wasn't just in Fairfax. It began with Palin's first appearance with McCain in August, at the Consol Energy Arena in Washington, Penn. The campaign attributed the 10,000 person crowd estimate it provided to reproters to "U.S. Secret Service figures, based on the number of people who passed through magnetometers," according to Bloomberg.

``We didn't provide any numbers to the campaign,'' Malcolm Wiley, a spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service told Bloomberg.

This might seem like a non-issue. After all, no one will really vote based on crowd size. But it nonetheless presents a real danger. Combined with the documented falsehoods peppering McCain campaign ads over the last week, and the repetition of those falsehoods on the campaign trail, the crowd size inflation feeds the emerging consensus that McCain, whose reputation was once based on telling it like it is (i.e. the truth), is running perhaps the most dishonest presidential campaign in recent history.

--Sean Mussenden