Obama's crowd: Record 2 million?

by Mark Silva and Richard Simon

In the business of crowd estimation, the National Mall is something of a riddle: The National Park Service will not count the crowd.

But those sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, some 1.9 miles from the steps of the Capitol where President Barack Obama has taken the oath of office, are unlikely to quibble with the estimate of a national security expert cited by the Washington Post:

2 million in attendance on the mall.

More than the record crowd that LBJ once turned out.

Sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Sonny Wells, a 65-year-old black man from Louisville, Ky., could barely see the Jumbotron that was displaying the ceremony - one of many big screens lined up the length of the mall from Capitol to Lincoln Memorial.

"I don't need to see it. I can hear it. I can feel the good feeling of being here,'' he said, adding: "We got someone in our corner for a change," with a certain reference to Obama.

Seated nearby, Myrna Mitchell, a black woman from New York who declined to give her age, said: "It's the greatest experience I think I'm going to experience in life."

Asked why they decided to perch at the Lincoln Memorial, her friend, Veron Thompson, also of New York City, said, "We walked around so much this morning we were glad to sit anywhere."

Gil Hawkins Jr., 51, a black man from New Haven, Conn., sat about as far from the swearing in as one could get, that nearly 2 miles from the Capitol at the Lincoln Memorial, and his view of the Jumbotron was partially obstructed. Still, he wasn't moving from the spot.

It was here, he said, that his aunt participated in the march on Washington in 1963 and where Martin Luther King spoke. "I felt it was my duty to come back and represent the family," he said, wearing a hat that read: "I was there, Obama inauguration."

(Spectators fill the National Mall, as seen from the Washington Monument, photo by David Stephenson/Lexington Herald-Leader)