Crowd control at Obama's inauguration.

[arcadian]

If I say I'm going to have x million at an event, does just saying that make it so? For instance, does saying that 5 million people will be on the Mall for Obama's inauguration, does that encourage more people to want to be there? Or did the sentiment of "being there" already exist with Obama's popularity? What if they said there were only going to be 500,000 would that have encouraged less people to show up? Also, how can they just throw out a number like 5,000,000? Where are they getting that? I've seen it as low as 1.5 million and as high as 5 million. There is a pretty big discrepancy between those two numbers.