Hillary Clinton's latest commercial, "Freefall," is perhaps one of the oddest political commercials I have ever seen.
So odd, in fact, that I decided to mash it up with one of my favorite movies, Airplane!, produced by an individual I admire, David Zucker, a Republican.
So here you go, "Hillary Clinton: America's Pilot."
At today's bloggers briefing at Heritage, Brent Bozell came by to talk about his new book Whitewash: What the Media Won't Tell You About Hillary Clinton, But Conservatives Will- that documents how the MSM has buried all negative news about Hillary Clinton, and is shamelessly promoting her presidential ambitions.
We also heard about a new conservative commentary and news website targeted at American and foreign expatriates, and a new study that grades the states on key labor issues.
Whitewashing Hillary Clinton
Bozell noted that the two most common reactions he’s gotten to his book so far are:
1) I had no idea.
2) I had forgotten all these things.
According to Bozell, many Conservatives don’t understand why many American voters still support Hillary Clinton. But it’s because many Americans don’t get their news from conservative media outlets.
He challenged us to examine the alphabet soup of Clinton scandals and name one that’s ever been resolved. But on the flip side, for a scandal involving a Republican – the media never lets the story die until they’ve gotten to the bottom of it.
As Bozell put it, there are two kinds of bias: that of commission and that of omission, and the MSM is guilty of both when it comes to the Clintons.
Also, the MSM consistently pushes the story of Hillary Clinton as a moderate, and there can only be two reasons for this: either they’re lying or they truly believe she’s a moderate. Despite the fact that her voting record in the Senate is almost in line with Ted Kennedy’s.
Bozell doesn’t think the MSM is lying, instead, “It just defines where they are on the spectrum. Don’t insult my intelligence by saying you’re being objective.â€
Building the Conservative Movement Abroad
Eric Staal is the chairman of Republicans Abroad Germany, and the founder of a new media venture, The Reactionary. As an American expatriate who’s lived abroad for many years, Eric described how the US is routinely defamed in Europe’s publicly-financed media. To combat this misinformation and to help win the hearts and minds of Europeans, and the millions of Africans and Asians who are reached by European media – Eric started the Reactionary. It’ll be an independent, for-profit journalism and commentary site, that’s modeled in part off of RealClearPolitics.
The Reactionary is planning a January 2008 launch, will publish in English, and is aimed at the 6 million America expatriates and the growing “global elite†who in Eric’s words live and work in a foreign country, or are engaged in international affairs.
The Reactionary’s twin goals are to “Help export the US Conservative movement, and nurture and foster Conservative movements as much as possible,†in other countries by becoming a platform for those ideas.
Eric ended by noting that America has, “Lost the moral support of the European right.†And we need to completely shift the terms of the debate and shake things up. He explained that if Conservative ideas can be repackaged to be new, edgy or cheeky (as they say in Britain) than people might be open to them.
Grading the States
Brian Johnson, the director of the Alliance for Worker Freedom (an affiliate of ATR), came by to announce the release (on Thursday) of AWF's state-by-state report card that uses quantitative and policy data to grade all 50 states on workers rights. Utah ranked #1 in the report.
A video has surfaced, anonymously, which promotes the candidacy of New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg who is/n't running for President as an Independent candidate. I'm doubtful that the Bloomberg camp had anything to do with the video, but it's worth digging in to for a number of reasons.
As you'll see, the video is edgy, hard-hitting, and could have the potential of going viral as the anti-Hillary Clinton "1984" spot did earlier this year. The message of the video is "Change v. More of the Same" and points to a URL bloombergwhitehouse.org which re-directs to Mike Bloomberg's website. In other words, it is clear the "anonymous" individual at least supports Mike Bloomberg's candidacy.
The video was uploaded by bloombergwhitehouse, is titled "Gender Bender," and for now, lives exclusively on Daily Motion:
Over-the-top? Or is this just another example of modern campaign warfare when the "Bad Boys" have a free video distribution tool at their fingertips?
UPDATE 2:26 PM: Jonathan Rick has ripped the Daily Motion video and posted it to YouTube.
As we blogged last week, there's a viral video quickly making its way around the 'net which "Truth-boats" Hillary Clinton. In fact, as my friend Greg pointed out in an email this morning, the video already has 1.5M views.
Today, we're starting to see the video break in to the mainstream media with this report by the Associated Press:
First came the Orwellian mash up YouTube video that portrayed Hillary Rodham Clinton as Big Brother. Then came a clip of her off-key rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Now, a stinging 13-minute video by a bitter Clinton foe is finding its own Internet audience.
The clip, a preview of a longer film by one-time Clinton donor Peter Paul, has scored more than 1.4 million hits on Google Video and about 350,000 on YouTube during the past week. Its popularity has driven it to the top spot on Google Video over the past two weeks.
Paul is a Hollywood entrepreneur, former partner of Spider-Man creator Stan Lee and convicted felon who has sued the Clintons in connection with a celebrity-packed fundraiser he helped organize for her 2000 Senate race. A California appeals court earlier this month ruled that Sen. Clinton should be dismissed from the suit.
But Paul has devoted a Web site to the case and his film, "Hillary Uncensored," in recent days has been touring New England College campuses. On Tuesday, the film is scheduled to be screened at the Metropolitan Club in New York City.
You can read the full AP story here.
Sarah Lai Stirland of Wired reports on a viral video quickly making the rounds, titled, "The Shocking Video Hillary Does NOT Want You To See!"
Watch it:
Here's an excerpt from Stirland's piece:
Hillary Rodham Clinton is the latest to feel the sting from a small but growing demographic that could have an outsized impact on the presidential race: people who've had bad experiences with a candidate, and who know how to use YouTube.
At issue is a 13-minute preview video co-produced by Peter Paul, a convicted felon and one-time donor to Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign, who's now turned against Clinton in her presidential run.
Titled The Shocking Video Hillary Does NOT Want You To See!, the video has been viewed on YouTube almost 177,000 times. On Google Video, where it first appeared, it's scored nearly 863,000 hits since it went online mid-July. On Thursday, it was the most viewed clip on the site, boasting 73,000 views, as well as the most e-mailed. The video was one of the most popular items on the news-recommendation site Digg last week, generating more than 4,000 "diggs," and putting it just behind the news that Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert plans to run for president, sort of.
Paul calls all this the "truth-boating" of Clinton's campaign, alluding to the notorious 2004 advertising campaign against Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry by the self-named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth "soft money" committee.
"It's a viral example of a story hidden by the media since I started whistle-blowing in 2001," says Paul in an interview. "It's up to the people on the internet to break the media embargo ... on the evidence that the people are entitled to have."
This is good. Share this with every Republican you know.
When I first posted the Clinton Sopranos parody video to YouTube, I could hardly imagine it would become the second most viewed video that day, with over 250,000 views. Other versions trailed narrowly behind, fetching at least 700,000 extra viewers. All told, over a million watched the video on YouTube.
That's not what the Clinton campaign intended. They wanted to have this moment all to themselves, so they didn't post it to their YouTube channel, instead roadblocking people to HillaryClinton.com where there would be no conversation, no comments, and no pesky video replies. While on the site, they also wanted people to sign up and donate.
You'd think only a Clinton supporter would post such a funny and flattering video of the two, but I saw this as an opportunity to divert traffic from the Clinton web site and perhaps reduce their online take from the video. It was successful, to the tune of a quarter million people who watched it on YouTube instead of HillaryClinton.com.
I'd just as soon not bring this up, as I've probably had beers with most of the people involved with this topic. But I feel that the cause of good, solid reporting on what Presidential eCampaignmeisters is worth setting the record straight.
Jonathan Martin brings up MittTV as an interesting example of Mitt going around the "media filter," a la HillaryHub. This isn't the first time I've seen MittTV signed out in writeups of Romney's website, and every time I have to ask, "Why?"
What is MittTV? It's Mitt Romney's videos on his website, draped in a custom player and a zingy name. But who isn't posting videos to the Web and YouTube? A number of candidates are even using their name and "TV" in the branding! Here's BarackTV and Hillary TV. Now, Romney's folks have been more aggressive about posting news clips of their guy to their YouTube channel, which is just smart strategy, but that's about the only differentiator to this that I can see.
Meanwhile, another worthwhile Romney effort, the Sign Up America campaign which signed up 30,000 supporters in 24 hours, didn't get as much play in the media. But over the long run, it's stuff like this -- the boring game of inches of recruiting volunteers and donors -- that has the greater impact.
I saw off of Todd Zeigler’s twitter that Hillary has started her very own social networking site!
Because MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and the other 91 socnets out there aren’t enough…
Now, the other top-tier Democratic presidentials are doing this – Obama’s got his own and Edward’s has OneCorps, but as my Mother always said…
I think this is one case where I don’t want Republican’s to imitate the Dem’s online practices.
I created an account with the campaign, and the largest group, with a whooping 23 members is LGBT COMMUNITY FOR HILLARY CLINTON. For those of you who didn’t go to a liberal college like myself LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual & Transgendered - what a mouthful.
I don’t think that the investment in time and energy to run these in-house platforms is well spent. At best you’ll get some people who’d never normally join Facebook or MySpace to create a profile on the Campaign’s socnet. But, I think the more likely situation is that the campaign is stealing its own lunch.
Most of the people who will make a profile will be the hardcore activists who already have a profile on Facebook. Furthermore, the work they’re doing to create content on the campaign’s own little internal socnet isn’t reaching anyone beyond the gated community. For a campaign, one of the primary purposes of a socnet is to have its modern media volunteers engaging with other people online and promoting the candidate.
These in-house socnets, like Clinton’s, suck energy, time and resources away from where activists should be focused: reaching out to undecided, or as yet unengaged voters, and instead channel the focus inward. In effect the campaign is connecting with itself.
A final note, related to socnets, but thankfully not to the Dems. Danah Boyd has a great blog essay, “viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace†(hat tip again to Todd). What’s really interesting is how Danah looks at the growth of MySpace and Facebook, and how and why people decide to use one socnet over another. I’ll comment more on her piece later.
Episode seven of our Internet-based TV show about the intersection of tech + politics, DomeNation, is now live. In it, Jerome and I talk about Hillary Clinton's "Sopranos" viral video and Fred Thompson's candidacy.
You can watch (please rate and share with your friends) it here:
Forgive me for tooting my own horn, but I wanted to show an example of user generated video that takes less than an hour to create. The quality isn't good enough for prime time, though a couple of high-resolution photos and better sound would do the trick. Sometimes. Allahpundit's Dean Photoshop project in 2004 was a massive hit, because it was very, very funny. With the right message, targeting the right weak points for candidates, the bloggers in your districts can have an impact on the race. They won't know until they practice.
