There’s still a lot of people trying to spin what happened at the March this weekend, everything from the numbers to media accusations the crowd was “angry” and “seething.” Nick Gillespie’s remarks about the march were spot-on:

I confess to having no way of checking or even evaluating these stats, but from my view of the proceedings (and having attended various events over the years), my sense is that 60,000 is way low and 2 million a stretch by a huge factor. Crowd counts are notoriously difficult and always pumped up or down for various reasons.
That said, the three takeaways I had from the event comport with Welch’s from yesterday’s post: First, the crowd was truly huge. Second, the crowd was from all over the place (both geographically and ideologically). And third, the crowd, well-behaved and stunningly normal in the main, was genuinely pissed off at out of control spending and government policies. “Stop spending,” was the basic answer to any questions about what Congress and the president should do come tomorrow. Throw the bums of either party out come next fall was the second most-common answer.

Everything Nick writes completely jibes with my experience. I’ve been covering marches in D.C. for nearly a decade and I will eat my hat if the march wasn’t well into six figures. Secondly, if you see a few crazy signs at the march on some left-wing blog and decide that it was a bunch of kooks on the mall, you’re dead wrong. (I’m looking at you, Rod Dreher.) I covered the March for over five hours, walking from Freedom Plaza to the front of the Capitol, back down to the reflecting pool and from one side of the mall to the other. During that time I saw only two birther signs, and yes, a few swastikas — but, ahem, those were also exceedingly rare. I spoke to dozens of people, and yes, they were all “stunningly normal.” Bottom line: If elected officials — GOP included — want to ignore what’s going on here on the basis that it’s a bunch of fringe crazies, they do so at their own peril.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg has the best discussion of the crowd size I’ve seen, with a low-end estimate of 240k and a high-end estimate of half a million. (Via Moe Lane.)