The anonymous digital graffiti that cleverly manipulates the iconic Apple 1984 commercial into a message that portrays Hillary Clinton as the evil Big Sister is a gift to media pundits everywhere.
Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if some enterprising political reporter conceived it simply to give him or her a platform to opine yet again about the way that YouTube is changing politics.
Trouble is, it's an old story. In its November 4/5 weekend edition, the Wall Street Journal ran a story headlined "In Web video spoofs, characters, cartoons; Ted Kennedy as Bluto." (Sorry, the pecunious but still unsatisfied WSJ only lets paying subscribers have access to its archived content).
The story referenced a video of Katherine Harris "vamping to the 1980s song "I Know What Boys Like" and a debate between two senatorial candidates in Minnesota that replaced their images with those of the equally petty and argumentative Itchy and Scratchy.
This previous wave of appropriation, mash-ups, and other digital Dada seems to have fled from the tiny memories of the Commentariat. Consider the widely quoted remark from Simon Rosenberg, president of the Washington-based New Democrat Network in Washington, D.C. Rosenberg said that the parody:
"... represents the power of individual activists in a new era...anybody can do powerful emotional ads ...campaigns are no longer in control... ... "It will no longer be a top-down candidate message; that's a 20th century broadcast model."
That's just silly. This particular mash-up has become a feeding frenzy because it involves the alpha and omega of the 2008 campaign, and because all sorts of preposterous accusations and insinuations are being made that the Obama campaign - in Swift-boat fashion - is somehow behind this.
But to extrapolate that the "top-down" model has been replaced, that what a candidate has to say about the issues confronting America will be less important than what somebody with basic desktop editing skills can create and disseminate, is sound-byte overreaction at its most ludicrous.
In fact, the reason that Senator Obama is capturing the imagination of American voters is precisely because of the top-down model. What he has to say, and the values he brings to the campaign, are have created the suddenly galvanizing dimension of his candidacy.
Will we see a proliferation of these manipulations, mash-ups and mockeries? Of course. Will the next one be as watched and commented upon as the one before? No. Will there be an occasional spike of interest when someone with a tenuous link to a campaign is responsible for some video trashing? No doubt. But no serious campaign will let itself be associated with anything that is simultaneously as ad hominem AND sophomoric as the 1984 spoof.
Interestingly, this spot appeared on the same day that MySpace launched its Impact Channel. Here, candidates will create their own pages and share more information about their lives and tastes than we ever wanted to know. Whether we want a president, though, who measures successes by their number of MySpace friends remains to be seen.
There is no question that campaigning in the digital age is a brand new communication challenge, if not an art form. How candidates use these new platforms will reflect on how he or she will lead, connect and engage the country. The same was true with radio - as FDR demonstrated - and as JFK did, with TV. At the same time, the way candidates react to YouTube and MySpace will be a measure of how they deal with criticism, how paranoid and thin-skinned they are. Leadership qualities, humor, dignity and balance are the same in any medium.
By the way, I'm amused by the comments on YouTube; the majority of respondents are seemingly unaware of the 22 year-old Apple spot than ran only one time on the Superbowl that inspired the send-up. Without that referent, and its implicit casting of IBM as Big Brother, whatever ironic message the mock commercial embodies is lost.