At Rally, Thousands — Billions? — Respond

Super-patriots Colbert and Stewart

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and BRIAN STELTER
NYT

WASHINGTON —Part circus, part satire, part holiday parade, the crowds that flooded the National Mall for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” on Saturday made it a political event like no other.

It was a Democratic rally without a Democratic politician, featuring instead two political satirists, Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert, who used the stage to rib national journalists and fear-mongering politicians, and to fake-fight each other over dueling songs about trains.

Though at no point during the show did either man plug a political candidate, a strong current of political engagement coursed through the enormous crowd, which stretched several long blocks west of the Capitol, an overwhelming response to a call by Mr. Stewart on his show on the Comedy Central network. The turnout clogged traffic, and filled subways and buses to the point of overflow.

The National Park Service did not offer a crowd estimate. But in an e-mail, one Comedy Central executive joked that the size of the crowd was “30 or 40 million.” And before the event, Mr. Colbert offered his own guess in a Twitter message: “Early estimate of crowd size at rally: 6 billion.”

(More here.)