Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee has deleted his campaign videos from Youtube and then resubmitted what appear to be the same videos [*]. This procedure deletes comments which had been left on the videos and resets their view counts, ratings, links, etc. They also appear to have changed their commenting policy from comments being unmoderated to them now having to be approved before they're posted.

The exact reason why they did this isn't known; one possible innocent explanation is that the original versions of the videos could have been missing a required FEC message, or they were missing their campaign URL, or similar. A less innocent explanation is that they wanted to delete some negative comments which were left and start over with comment moderation. But, then again, they can delete comments and change moderation policy through Youtube's standard administration scheme. That's so easy anyone could do it, but that doesn't mean their staff could figure it out. The original videos were all high rated, so it probably doesn't involve trying to reset that.

Perhaps the litmus test will come when I find out whether a comment I left on his original "Immigration" video is approved or not:

"Huck" is sending a loud message to all future illegal aliens: live here for a while, and we'll give you amnesty. Needless to say, millions more illegal aliens would try to come here if he became president. Thankfully, there's almost zero chance of that happening.

The original version of that video was at youtube.com/watch?v=NFOTP98vLzo, but that now says the video was deleted by the user. The new version of the video is here; a cached version of the original page is here, showing 1377 views and 9, not specifically anti-Huck comments.

Other caches showing a few to a few hundred views each:

Health care (1)
National Security/Foreign Policy (1)
Arts and Education (1)
Taxes/Economy (1)
Faith and Politics (1)
Same Sex Marriage (1; two slightly negative comments)
Sanctity of Life (1; four positive comments)
Israel (1; one slightly negative comment)

* UPDATE: The cached pages don't play videos, but they do show times. The new videos appear to be 3 to 6 seconds longer than the original videos. Yet, the intro to the new videos is 1.5 seconds and the outro is about 8 to 9 seconds.