• San Francisco Chronicle, Tuesday, June 10, 2008 11 AM

The San Francisco Chronicle chronicles the rise and fall of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign through online video, from the announcement of her candidacy to the campaign's ending earlier this week. As writer Joe Garofoli says, "each of the videos was viewed enough to dominate the news for at least a day." Ultimately, political analysts claim that what hurt her campaign most was its inability to harness the power of online video to soften the New York Senator's image with voters.

"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," suggests George Washington University Professor and new-media analyst Michael Cornfeld.

For millions of young Americans, many of which will vote in their first election this year, online video is a type of media currency, which the users control, Garofoli says. Users are capable of uploading anything the candidates say and do in a matter of minutes and then mash up their video as they please. For Clinton, the most detrimental example was one user's mashup of Apple's famous 1984 Macintosh ad with Clinton's early Web video efforts, which portrayed her as a Big Brother type figure and then pointed users to Barack Obama's Web site. Clinton's videos, meanwhile, had decidedly high-production/stilted/over-scripted quality-a turn-off to Web 2.0 users who prize authenticity over everything else.

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