First lady will need guts to survive one of the world’s toughest jobs

NOBODY’S sure just how many people are going to form the crush in the Mall and line the streets of Washington for tomorrow’s inauguration.

It will be somewhere between two and four million. Four hundred thousand came for George W Bush’s second inauguration. A total of 1.2 million came for Lyndon Johnson’s, following the Kennedy assassination.

The sheer numbers trekking across America, most of them from and through killingly cold states, underlines the hopes and dreams embodied in this slender biracial new Commander in Chief.