President Bush has had to overcome many obstacles during the past 8 years, but nobody ever expected him to have to avoid an international crisis involving flying shoes. And yet, this is the exact situation he faced on Saturday when he stood side-by-side with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to deliver his last news conference from Baghdad. An Iraqi journalist launched a pair of shoes -- reportedly a size 10 -- at the President, who deftly avoided the blow by ducking behind his podium. Watch below to see that, despite being the leader of the free world for the better part of 8 years, President Bush's reaction time is faster than ever.
After first seeing the video, we couldn't resist monitoring how this unfortunately historic event would be reflected in the world of viral video, so we tapped into our Viral Reach Database and saddled up for the ride.
At 9:00 PM Sunday night, just 7 hours after the first videos popped up, there were more than 120 placements, 24,000 views, and 600 comments. 12 hours later, at 7:00 AM Monday morning, the video had spread far and wide, skyrocketing to more than 450 placements, 3.2 million views, and 35,000 comments.
Since then, placements, views, and comments have grown consistently, with a spike late in the afternoon, pushing the event's footprint past 650 placements, 5.5 million views, and 48,000 comments (!!).
Ironically, the last time we witnessed a video with a similarly rapid level of viewership growth was when President-Elect Obama gave his victory speech. To put things in perspective, Obama's speech had generated close to 5 million views with 200 placements after 24 hours. In comparison, President Bush's feat, er, footwork produced 4.4+ million views with close to 650 placements 24 hours after its initial launch around 2:30 PM on Sunday. While Bush's tap dancing came up just short in terms of views, its multitude of placements gives it the potential to dwarf Obama's numbers.
What do you think? Will President Bush's dodging skills continue to sizzle, or will they get all worn out? Stay tuned, we might be updating results as time permits throughout the week.
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The data used in this post was collected from Visible Measure's Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing video repository of analytic data on 100+ million Internet videos from 150+ video-sharing destinations.