Palin Draws Huge Crowds in Florida (25,000 to 60,000)

While working the campaign in The Villages in Florida, Sarah Palin drew a huge crowd. This news was pretty exciting to right-leaning sources as evidence by stories at Hot Air, Wizbang, Gateway Pundit, and the Corner. I think after a week of poor polling for McCain, people were looking for something to be excited about.

How big? That is up for debate. One fire marshal estimated the crowd at 60,000 while another estimated it at only 25,000. So in comments on all those posts, above, you can see people taunting: "It was only 25,000!" Putting that in perspective:

Population of The Villages: 70,000
Crowd size for GWB in 2004: 15,000
Crowd size for Biden in 2008 across FL: 2,000

If you are running for public office and the news of the day is whether or not your appearances are drawing 10 times or 30 times the number your opponent's appearances are drawing, it is pretty safe to say that is good news.

Update: I looked for pictures of the crowd and there just aren't many to be found. Why is this? I'm not asking from a partisan perspective. The news images for political rallies never seem to show the actual crowd--just the candidate--even when the story is about how big the crowd is. I did find this one photo at Hugh Hewitt's blog:


But don't focus on the crowd. Ariana Huffington says Sarah Palin's star is fading. Didn't I already explain, in reference to Michele Obama, that jealousy isn't becoming?