• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, March 26, 2008

As of this morning, presidential candidate Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia about race relations had been viewed around 3.8 million times on YouTube alone.

When the speech aired on TV last week, around 4 million viewers watched it in real time. In other words, approximately as many people saw Obama's address on their own time, via YouTube, as on cable. And that's not even counting the other Web sites where the speech resides.

Of course, YouTube's role here wasn't just to give Obama's speech traction. The site also set the stage for Obama's talk by hosting clips of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's incendiary statements. While media reports about Wright's sermons had been floating around for a while, they didn't seem to enter public consciousness until they surfaced on YouTube.

Politico.com writer Michael Calderone makes the same point about Hilary Clinton's "misstatement" about running from snipers during her trip to Bosnia in the 1990s. While some reporters were skeptical of the anecdote, it wasn't until CBS recently released video footage from the trip that she was forced to backtrack from her earlier statements.

It's becoming apparent that the Web, especially video sites like YouTube, give voters a fast, easy way to learn a great deal about politics. Interested Web users no longer need to read archived news stories or otherwise spend time reading and researching to get beyond the spin -- not when the video evidence is staring them in the face at YouTube.

At the same time, it's not only speeches or old footage that are having an impact on the race. At least one ad by the Obama campaign has drawn around half a million views since it was uploaded last week.

The clip features 18-year-old Casey Knowles, who appears in Clinton's now infamous "Children" spot. That ad, which used old stock footage of Knowles, shows her asleep in bed while a voice asks the audience which candidate they would prefer as president when the White House phone rings at 3 a.m. Knowles, now 18 and firmly in the Obama camp, in the new ad talks about the "Children" spot and the politics of fear as well as her support for the candidate.

It's safe to assume that Clinton didn't foresee this response when her campaign created the first ad. It's also likely that neither she nor Obama imagined that footage of events from years past would not only surface but gain traction online.