Hillary Rodham Clinton is known for a lot of things. Stirring oratory isn't one of them.
But, if you were judging her performance strictly on crowd response, last June's appearance at the New York Democratic Party convention in Buffalo would stand out as a highlight. Mrs. Clinton was there to accept her party's nomination for the Senate, and, because everyone understood that this formality was really her first step toward the White House, the place had the air of a coronation.
Mrs. Clinton conveyed herself almost perfectly. She was poised and pleasant; she hit all the right notes. Many in the hushed crowd were visibly moved by her performance.
The catch is that the person who so impressed the audience wasn't really her – it was her image, beamed onto a giant screen. That image appeared in an 18-minute video put together by her media adviser, Mandy Grunwald, which chronicled her 5 ½ years in the Senate and was gilded with testimonials from firefighters, veterans, grateful mothers, even her husband.
And this created a rather awkward contrast with what happened next: When the lights came up and the real Mrs. Clinton finally spoke, all her liabilities as a public speaker were on full display. It aimed to be a soaring call to arms, but, when the audience heeded her final call to stand, the ovation was strictly pro forma. At least on this day, the virtual Mrs. Clinton seemed much more appealing than the real one.
In previous election cycles, the need to substitute virtual images for authenticity would have been viewed as a considerable weakness. But not these days. After a fall campaign of candidates falling prey to YouTube moments, Mrs. Clinton has demonstrated how Web video can be used to launch a candidacy rather than snuff one out.
Granted, she wasn't the first to declare her candidacy over the Internet; Barack Obama did so several days earlier. But Mr. Obama's offering was sparse and poorly lit: He appeared to be shadowed by slatted window blinds, like a Mickey Spillane gumshoe. It didn't matter much, since Mr. Obama's rapturous public image could scarcely be improved and his charisma is more than evident in public appearances.
Mrs. Clinton, who has neither advantage, needed more help from the Web. And she got it, in the form of an announcement video that was a marvel of technical and political proficiency: warmly lit, softly focused and shot in her own home.
By announcing via the Web, Mrs. Clinton ensured that only her best face would be amplified. And, rather than launching out on the campaign trail, she followed up with a three-night series of online "conversations" in which regular folks could e-mail questions for her to answer in Web-video broadcasts. These, too, aimed to create the impression of eagerness to interact with the masses – but they were carefully vetted by her staff to ensure that nothing uncomfortable slipped through.
In her first week of candidacy, Mrs. Clinton managed to avoid a single spontaneous moment, thereby eliminating any risk of a campaign-killing gaffe or, for that matter, even a minor misstep. Yet her announcement and the first leg of her campaign still wound up all over the Web – and, in the absence of any alternative access to the candidate, they were rebroadcast all over television, as she and her handlers surely knew they would be.
By putting technology to clever use, she turned the handicap of her reliance on talented consultants into an asset and debunked the notion that Web video is inherently dangerous to politicians. In effect, she became the first post-YouTube candidate.
Not everyone has been swept away by Hillary 2.0, of course. The Republican National Committee charged that Mrs. Clinton's "conversations" were "short, screened and seemingly scripted" and highlighted some of the pabulum they yielded: her favorite movies ( Out of Africa, Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz), her favorite football team (the Chicago Bears), her love of long walks.
But the Clinton camp could not be more thrilled. Peter Daou, the Internet director for Mrs. Clinton's exploratory campaign, proudly pointed to the popular Web site Yahoo Answers, where a question Mrs. Clinton recently posted about how to fix health care had just eclipsed one posed by Oprah Winfrey in the number of "answers" it yielded. "That really sums up the level of interest and excitement about her on the Internet," Mr. Daou raved. "The Internet is a tremendous tool for us."
Indeed, Mrs. Clinton's nascent candidacy, in particular, seems favored by the new norms of Web politics, which offer the appearance of intimacy without the risk and mitigate an uninspiring style by making it possible for voters to simply download the missing element of emotional connection the same way you might add a plug-in to your Web browser.
Joshua Green is a senior editor at The Atlantic. A longer version of this essay was published in The New Republic. E-mail the author at letters@tnr.com.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]