Staff Plays Numbers Game on Bush’s Crowd in Prague

It was almost as though the White House staff was determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

On Saturday, in Prague, Czechoslovakia, President Bush spoke to the largest such crowd in his presidency--more than 100,000 enthusiastic Czechs and Slovaks. It was a triumphal appearance by any standard and doubly welcome for an American President burdened with declining ratings in public opinion polls.

But instead of basking in its success, White House staff members spent much of Saturday night in a furious effort to persuade members of the press corps that Bush’s audience was far larger. Their preferred figure was 800,000, a number that would have represented fully two-thirds of the population of Prague.

One White House official heatedly accused a reporter for a major East Coast newspaper of having “insulted the Czech people and the President” by estimating the crowd somewhere in the 100,000 range, a figure used by most other reporters.

In effect, White House aides were arguing that to draw an audience of a mere 100,000 people was an inadequate achievement or a defeat for Bush.

Crowd counts at large public events are always problematic and subject to varying estimates. White House officials, however, could provide no explanation for how they arrived at their 800,000 count.

Journalists reporting a crowd of between 100,000 and 200,000 based their estimate on several factors: During the Czechoslovak revolution last year, reporters covering repeated demonstrations in Wenceslas Square, the site of Bush’s speech, calculated that the square could hold roughly 250,000 people when jampacked from end to end, an estimate generally accepted by the Czechoslovak government and opposition groups. During Bush’s speech, there was a huge crowd, but it did not fill the entire square.