The Associated Press describes Barack Obama’s Saturday event in Detroit as a packed high-school gym. Donald Trump, campaigning in Georgia that evening, insisted “the place was empty.”

A useful disagreement, because it concerns a subject on which America once possessed a fairly sturdy bipartisan framework: whether people are in a room.

Apparently the presidential vision plan does not cover crowds applauding somebody else. You can see the basketball hoop. You can see the exit. The people underneath them are an out-of-network expense.

I would like this ability applied to less consequential tasks. Imagine opening the garage, declaring it empty and discovering that the lawnmower, Christmas decorations and seven boxes of cables have become somebody else’s problem.

It would save a weekend. It is a less attractive method of evaluating public events.

Make powerful people uncomfortable.
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No exact attendance figure is necessary to understand the issue. Nor does a busy gym predict an election winner. A crowd can be a crowd without becoming either a national mandate or an optical illusion.

That modest proposition should not require a constitutional convention.

The exhausting part is the proposed job assignment for everyone else. A politician makes a claim; reporters and readers now have to spend part of the day establishing that the visible people occupy physical space. We have pressing problems. Auditing the existence of a high-school audience should not be one of them.

Perhaps the gym should install a second scoreboard. One side can display the number of people present. The other can display how many the president is currently willing to acknowledge.

At least then the disagreement would come with a buzzer.

Source: Associated Press, October 24. The vision plan, garage and scoreboard are satire, not reported events.