An underground Internet ad targeting Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential candidacy is breaking new ground by attracting the sort of large audience once reserved for well-funded campaigns and advocacy groups that could afford expensive TV spots.
“The use of video on the Web will change politics in the same way it did in 2004 with fundraising and 2006 in the Senate race of George Allen,” Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh said. “It will also change the way campaigns are covered, as well as the way messages and attacks are delivered.”
The ad, which has been viewed more than a million times on the Web site YouTube and replayed endlessly on TV news broadcasts, is an adaptation of the iconic “1984” television spot that introduced Apple Macintosh computers 23 years ago. Images of Clinton are substituted for the Orwellian “Big Brother” in the original spot, which aired only once — during the 1984 Super Bowl.
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In the updated version, row after row of mind-numbed “proles” stare vacantly at a giant screen of Clinton dispensing banalities. Then a colorfully dressed woman, chased by storm troopers, hurls a sledgehammer that shatters the screen and frees the proles from their oppression.
Clinton will not comment on the ad, campaign spokesman Phil Singer said.
Her rival, Sen. BarackObama, who is cited at the end in a way that suggests his campaign either made or approved the ad, called the spot “pretty extraordinary.”
“One of the things about the Internet is that people generate all kinds of stuff,” he told a television interviewer. “In some ways, it’s the democratization of the campaign process. But it’s not something that we had anything to do with.”
Media expert Andrew Breitbart of Breitbart.com said people such as the ad’s creator, who has not been identified, could shake up the traditional model of campaign advertising.
“They could take it away from the Washington, D.C.-type of political entities that aren’t necessarily that creative — they’re thinking in sort of 1980s, 1990s political advertising terms,” he said.
Conservative author Ann Coulter called the spot “amazingly powerful.”
“It gets around the campaign finance laws, which I think is always good for conservatives,” she told Fox News. “More information is good for conservatives.”
