This Is Beneath Us. Do Not Watch It.

Or else, be prepared for a somewhat guilty pleasure at best. I cannot emphasize enough the role that I think YouTube is going to play in the 2008 Presidential election. This video mashup appears to have been made by a slightly deranged miscreant who dislikes Hillary Clinton. It is weird, occasionally surprising, interesting in a sort of sick way and probably will not get a lot of views compared to the thousands of other campaign clips out there on the Internets this year. I think it gives a fair idea what one or two determined amateurs with an inexpensive video editing tool can do over one crazed weekend.

There is a venerable history of what we could call "viral campaigning". By definition, most citizen campaign forays are negative ones. They are easy to do and generally a lot punchier. There will also be faux citizen video clips that surface during this campaign, almost all from the GOP side, Those will have fake errors and camera shake, but they will at heart be so stupid and cheesy that I predict they will have little or no impact.

The long history of viral campaigning? Oddly enough, in Tibet there turns out to be a venerable tradition of street songs. Catchy, punning, sarcastic street songs that some miscreant starts to sing and that just catch on and spread around the capital city like wildfire. A friend of mine's father was the target of one such street ditty. He said some parts of it were unprintably obscene and suggestive, other parts were merely insulting and insinuating. And his father survived and went to on to eventually be portrayed as the evil protagonist in a 24 hour Chinese mini-series that was then translated and edited into a 20 hour Tibetan language version. And that version went on to become one of the most watched films in Tibetan all over the world, where the fire-breathing anti-Chinese speeches my friend's father is show delivering have turned him into an unlikely folk hero, since in life he was a fairly low-key guy. So clearly, a street ditty does not always destroy one's career.

But a viral video? I think images have far more power to move opinions. Watch this one and see what you think. I do not dislike Clinton, she just weirds me out because she is capable of sounding just like my 7th grade French teacher, the one that scared the hell out of me. And then she'd be all happy, then she'd go back to scaring me and speaking at a high volume right in my face. Mademoiselle Grey. I still shiver when I think about her.


Arthur