Back in March of last year, a video mashup shook up the political scene, when some anonymous tech sleuth had the audacity to attack Hillary Clinton. The video was posted at YouTube under the name "ParkRidge47," a sly reference to Hillary Clinton's childhood home town. The message: Hillary Clinton is Big Brother, or at least, Hillary Clinton is having an Orwellian "one-way" conversation with America -- and one candidate, a-la-Apple Computers classic 1984 Superbowl ad, can change that. It closed with a scroll directing people to the website of Hillary's chief rival, BarackObama.com.

Cue the video in the event that you were not one of the 4,000,000+ viewers who watched it:

After the unmasking of the video-masher, the popular thinking was that the 2008 elections were going to be fraught with these kind of new, or modern media, attacks. To my knowledge, there hasn't been another viral video that has "tipped," (as Malcolm Gladwell might put it), at least not the same way the Vote Different video did. Instead, I think we've seen a proliferation of campaign-based web videos. Nothing challenged Phil de Vellis's little masterpiece.

At least, that is, until about two weeks ago. Cut to the new video:

This video too was posted by an anymous YouTuber, though, to be fair, it appears "keithhib" is a McCain fan. No surprise there--I think last weekend's debates showed that Mitt and John aren't the best of friends. Self-disclosure: I find myself squarely in the McCain column as well.

Now maybe some of you don't remember Max Headroom (see YouTube clips here). Wikipedia has this on file, " artificial intelligence, known for his surreal wit and stuttering, distorted, electronically sampled voice."

You get it? Max Headroom, the contrived marketing device is Mitt Romney, or something like that. Now leaving aside whether Romney has flipped or "evolved" on several issues--the video doesn't really hit that note--one fact is certain: Mitt has probably outspent most of the other GOP candidates on advertising. So there's a certain guerilla nature to this video.

Now for some analysis: the Max Headroom / Mitt Romney mashup isn't perfect, in fact, it leaves something to be desired. The "Vote Different" ad was more than a minute in length; the "Max Romney" vid is half that.

Is this video in any way effective? Will it go viral like the Hillary-1984 mashup? If not, why not? Do the Romney folks have anything to be worried about? Will a lot of people just be saying: that's cute, but so what? I'm interested to see what TechRepublican readers think.