The Dower Power Hour

Lets talk about Hillary Clinton.  Specifically, lets talk about what she’s done with this YouTube “YouChoose 08 Spotlight” opportunity.  For more information about it is, please check out the article I wrote for A Modest Proposal.  Now, historically speaking I haven’t been a big fan of Hillary.  Her hungering for the Presidency scares me a bit and she’s kind of a one woman show and not much of a team player.  However, I have to say I have been highly impressed with what she’s done with the YouTube Spotlight.

Other candidates have taken different approaches to this direct interraction with the online community. Again, for more comments on that please check out my article. Most of them have been fairly straight forwarded: talk about your hero, what you’re going to do to improve America, etc… Hillary, however, tried something a bit more - dare I say - fun.

The video opens with Hillary asking for advice on “one of the most important questions in this campaign.” She spends a lot of time building up the suspense on what she’s going to ask about before finally saying, flat out, “what do you think [her] campaign song should be?” Now, my initial reaction was actually annoyance. This is a rare opportunity to get real feedback and she squanders it by being silly?

However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that her tactic was actually better. It’s hard to get real feedback from random Internet bloggers, and most of it isn’t very helpful. The kind of person that would post a video response to a politician usually has already made up their mind on the issue or candidate and is enough of a political junkie to find their answer without a direct response. However, Hillary has a reputation for being such a dislikable stiff that for her to do something fun and unexpected was probably a smart move. The video closed with a real clip of her singing the Star Spangled Banner (horribly) and her solemn pledge not to sing the selected campaign theme.

One week later she posted another video, this time with her splicing humorous YouTube video clips together as great “responses” to her prompt. None of those clips was actually a posted response, but they were pretty funny. She then got “serious” and showed an example of what a real campaign song would be like set to videos of her campaign. She finished by thanking people for their support, followed by clips of people saying how ridiculous her question was, and encouraged her viewers to vote in the final round.

Again, I understand she’s going to get some ridicule from the YouTube political community for taking a non-substantive approach, but personally I was pleased to see a Hillary that could make me laugh. I know that’s not really an important credential for a Presidential candidate and the video was clearly contrived to get this exact response. It probably wasn’t even her idea; some clever staff member made a remark about making her more personable and this was the end result. Still, she did better with the opportunity presented by YouTube than most of the other candidates, and I’m pleased that she’s the kind of person that would voluntarily post an embarrassing MSNBC clip of her singing, especially during a political campaign. That’s a gutsy move and I approve.