So we agree. No, I’m not surprised that 300 students could be hired to show up. It’s even possible that many in NYC would show up on their own, but Huma and company would not want to take a chance that only a handful would not be there. By the end of the day, according to a reliable source, the price of the book around the country had plummeted. Do you remember when the Clinton campaign had hired some big halls for the campaign and had to have everyone sit close in so the cameras could fake a crowd?
It's not like Clinton was going to deliver a long, boring speech, was it? Just sign books, right? Half a million women showed up at the Pussy Hat Rally (or whatever it was called) in DC. Probably a large proportion of them were from Greater New York and the surrounding area, so it shouldn't have been that hard for HRC to draw a crowd of a few hundred.
Three hundred in a city of 8 million or a metropolitan area of 20 million isn't impossible, even for a politician who doesn't impress people who aren't already for her.