How new media affected Clinton campaign
The rise and fall of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign can be traced through video - from her first announcement to the apparent suspension of the campaign. Some of the video was scripted fare, much of it wasn’t. Some of it aired on network TV, much of it spread virally online.
And each of the videos was viewed enough to dominate the news for at least a day. Collectively, they helped shape the narrative of her campaign.
What hurt Clinton most, political analysts say, is that she couldn’t consistently use the newfound ubiquity of video to soften her image with voters. Or, as George Washington University Professor and new-media analyst Michael Cornfeld said, “It’s like the Clintons, both of them, had sort of a ‘Sunset Boulevard’ thing going on. They were silent screen stars who couldn’t make the transition to talkies.”
Conquering video in the digital age has less to do with being telegenic or smart, as both Clintons are. Being a politician in the YouTube era means being comfortable with giving up control of your message and realizing that everything you say or do can be uploaded within minutes for the whole world to see - and then mashed up into something new.
Video is the media currency of the millions of young Americans who voted in the primary season this year, many for the first time. Stories told through video percolated to traditional media from blogs and online advocacy sites, from the tirades of Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to the off-script comments of Bill Clinton.
Authenticity is more prized online than high production values - the only thing worse than being caught in a gaffe is being perceived as overscripted. For much of the first half of the campaign, analysts say, Clinton was overscripted.
“Hillary’s announcement video had really high production values, like it was a made-for-TV movie,” said Dan Manatt, executive producer of PoliticsTV.com, a political video site.
So were her first Web chats, where she answered questions from voters. They may have looked good, but they weren’t the stuff that generates buzz for a campaign.
“The Web values authenticity,” Manatt said, “and these were seen as staged and scripted and inauthentic.”
One Obama supporter seized upon Hillary Clinton’s stilted quality and created the “Vote Different” online video, a mashup of Apple’s famous 1984 Macintosh ad and Clinton’s early Web efforts. It portrayed Clinton as a Big Brother figure and pointed viewers to Obama’s Web site.
An Obama supporter, Phil de Vellis, created it on a Sunday afternoon because he was frustrated with the way politicians were using online video. “They were treating it just like TV. They were broadcasting things online. You have to do more. You have to interact with your audiences.”
Plus, he wanted to show how an individual - using new media tools - could change the course of the campaign.
“We’re starting to see in these campaigns where being seen as too scripted can be seen as a liability,” said Patrick Ruffini, a GOP online strategist and founder of the new the Next Right blog, “in that you can be lampooned for it.”
It’s not like Obama didn’t have his YouTube nightmares - the nation surely has not seen the last of his former pastor. But at the height of the Wright controversy, Obama delivered a long, nuanced speech about race in America. Within a week, nearly 4 million people had watched in on YouTube, and soon the heat on the story died down.
“Even (former GOP presidential candidate and Mormon) Mitt Romney gave a speech on religion, even though it may not have been as good,” Cornfeld said. “But Hillary didn’t try to give that kind of speech about what it meant to be a woman in this race. Two kinds of people needed to hear that speech: men and women. She never really took control of that topic.”
While Clinton reportedly will suspend her campaign Saturday, Nichola Gutgold, an associate professor of communication at Penn State University, said it was important that the nation’s most viable female presidential candidate didn’t quit.
And while her campaign may have made missteps, “she looked like a president,” said Gutgold, author of “Paving the Way for Madam President.”
However, because of the evolving nature of video, sometimes that’s not enough.