Despite Knowing the Reasons Why, Smithsonian Doesn't Know the Reasons Why Attendance Was Way Up in 2009

A sort of funny bit of strangeness in a story coming from the Washington Post. According to the paper, the Smithsonian set new records for attendance in 2009, with somewhere around 30 million people visiting their various museums. We knew why this was, because we’d been talking about it all last year (the inauguration, the expanded hours, the movie tie-ins), as did Jacqueline Trescott who wrote the Post story and begins it by saying nearly the same.