Biding His Time

Fred Thompson is winning -- at least on Youtube.

If you’re Fred Thompson, you’ve got to be encouraged about jumping into the race. In the wake of Tuesday’s debate among Republican presidential candidates, it was the former Tennessee senator who topped the field in YouTube views — and he wasn’t even participating.

Online intelligence firm New Media Strategies measured which candidate got the biggest YouTube bump from the May 15 debate in South Carolina. It also counted the number of viewers of Thompson’s video responding to Michael Moore, which was viewed online concurrently with the GOP debate.

As of Wednesday afternoon, Thompson’s video, in which he suggests that Moore might look into a mental institution, drew 598,600 viewers on Vimeo, YouTube and Google Video.

That dwarfs the most views from any moment during the debate. Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani’s exchange over Sept. 11 was tops from the actual event, with 16,904 views from online postings.

Mitt Romney drew 4,394 views from online postings; Paul alone got 3,273 views; John McCain, Giuliani and Romney on terrorism and torture drew 2,621 viewers. Even Mike Huckabee’s well-received joke about John Edwards’ hair only drew 365 viewers.

Michael Moore's challenge was superbly-timed for Thompson's purposes in that it gave him a huge audience on the day of the Republican debates.

[UPDATE:] I expect that one of the first criticisms of Senator Thompson will be that he smokes cigars.   If he's the man I think he is, he'll respond by lighting another one -- winning 10,000 more votes in the process.