Net Video Points To Bigger Role In Politics For Average Citizen

WASHINGTON — Internet users and political bloggers have launched a feverish hunt for the creator of a video that has become a Web sensation by depicting Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as a "1984" Big Brother figure lecturing to an audience of zombies.

Although the mystery producer has yet to surface, the video — first posted on the Internet site YouTube and then aired across the country — has generated more than who-done-it curiosity.

It's also the latest sign of a new political era, in which individual citizens can play a larger role, just by using the tools of communication at their fingertips.

Politicians and their campaign aides, who for decades have honed their messages for TV news sound bites and 30-second TV commercials, are discovering a new and unpredictable world, said Simon Rosenberg, founder of the liberal-leaning group, the New Democrat Network. "They're losing control, and there's nothing they can do about it" in the fast changing Internet era, he said.

"The real story here is we're entering an age of people-driven politics," said Rosenberg. He said anyone with "a couple of thousand dollars" and home editing equipment could have made the "1984" anti-Clinton video, a re-do of a class ad first used by the Apple company to introduce its Macintosh computers as competitors with IBM.

Called a "mash-up" — a Web term for mixing politics with images from popular media — the ad remake shows a female runner wearing the symbol of Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign and hurling a sledge hammer into the screen image of Clinton mid-speech.

Obama, the Illinois Democrat, has denied that his campaign had any role in the video but called it an example of "democratization of the process."

Clinton shrugged off questions about whether it would affect her presidential effort. "I might quibble a little bit about the content," the New York Democrat told the radio station NY1. "But if we get more people, especially young people, thinking about politics, I'm happy about that."

Not everyone agrees that the 1984 video will prove to be a campaign milestone. Marketing trend expert Adam Hanft, writing for the online Huffington Post, predicts it will soon blow over and the next attack video will bring a "spike of interest" only if it is linked to one of the rival campaigns.

The anti-Clinton Web video is not the first such posting involving the 2008 candidates. Fellow Democrat John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator, has been lampooned by a four-year-old YouTube video taken of him combing his hair with the song "I Feel Pretty" playing in the background.

A new video image of "Disco Rudy" puts Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani's head on the body of John Travolta wearing a white suit in the movie "Saturday Night Live."

The image, posted on a site called Second Life, is superimposed with reminders of his controversial divorce when he was mayor of New York.

"The information is nothing new," said David All, an Internet political consultant and former aide to Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga. However, the appearance of this video is new and brings the issues back into discussion, he said.

The growing role of the Internet could easily outrun candidates, warned All. He cited the failure of the Clinton campaign to set up an official site on the popular MySpace.com.

Although Clinton supporters set up an official site, it has links to "cafepress," an online public store for campaign gear. For sale among the "Hillary for President" mugs and T-shirts are a selection of items the candidate might not want to promote — including "Anyone But Hillary" bumper stickers and "Say No to Whacko" anti-Clinton T-Shirts.

Such is the rough-and-tumble of the Internet.

"We're entering a world now where there are no rules," Rosenberg said, comparing today to the early years of the television era in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

"The 21st century politics will be very different," he said. "We don't know how this all will play out, but we know it's going to be very different from what came before."