• The Wrap, Tuesday, November 2, 2010 10:27 PM

"The success or failure of a rally is judged by only two criteria," Jon Stewart said on Saturday, opening his much-anticipated "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" in Washington. "The intellectual coherence of the content and its correlation to the engagement ... I'm just kidding. It's color and size, we all know it's color and size." It was certainly colorful. And big.

Stewart and Stephen Colbert's rally drew approximately 215,000 people to the National Mall -- or roughly 125,000 more than Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally did at the same spot in August -- according to CBS News. The network commissioned an aerial photo company -- AirPhotosLive.com, the same one it used for Beck's -- to get its estimate. The photo company says it has a margin of error of plus or minus 10 percent.

The National Park Service, which approved the rally permit, does not give crowd estimates as a policy, but a park ranger said it appeared more than 200,000 people showed up to restore sanity and/or fear. More than 300,000 people had RSVP'd on Facebook for the event.

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