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Journal of Visual Literacy, 2009 Volume 28, Number 1, 70-91-

Im In!: Hillary Clintons 2008 Democratic Primary Campaign on YouTube

Amber Davisson Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Abstract In 2008, during the Democratic Primary, Hillary Clinton posted 353 campaign videos to YouTube. Each of these campaign videos demonstrated the candidates attempts to negotiate the complexities of emerging digital technologies, media interpretations of her political persona, and her role as a non-traditional candidate. This essay uses Mikhail Bakhtins notion of speech genres to discuss the rhetorical strategies present in three of Clintons campaign videos. The relationship between the speech genres used by the campaign and the culture of YouTube as a communication sphere highlights the gap between traditional methods of campaign rhetoric and what is persuasive about digital technology. Key words: YouTube, Speech Genres, Hillary Clinton, Parody, Democratic Primary

n January of 2007, when New York Senator Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for president, she said she was In it to win it. Clinton was far from being the first female candidate to seek the White House, but she was one of the first female candidates to voice a very real expectation that she could win (Kunin, 2008). In the past, female candidates wanted to push the conversation forward, make it easier for the next woman, but they never expected to be elected (Kunin, 2008, p. 165). For a while, in 2007, it seemed like being elected was a very real possibility; some were even calling Clintons victory inevitable (Chait, 2007). In the Democratic Primary, Clinton received 17,267,658 votes, only 166,000 votes less than the victor, Barack
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Obama, and more votes than any candidate had received in any U.S. primary prior to 2008 (Cillizza, 2008). Throughout the race the Clinton campaign used digital communication tools such as blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace to communicate the candidates political platform and develop her online persona. Hillary Clinton posted 353 videos to YouTube during her 18-month campaign and continued to post videos after she lost the primary. YouTube allowed Clinton to take her message directly to the voters, rather than simply relying on the sound bites chosen by mainstream media news outlets. This essay considers the speech genres used in three of the campaigns videos in order to understand how the technology on the YouTube site socialized the candidates speech and influenced citizens interpretations of the campaign. As a presidential candidate, Clinton is fascinating, because her entire political career can be cast as a struggle to be politically powerful while responding to constant attacks regarding her performance of femininity. In an analysis of political cartoons depicting the candidate, Templin (1999) argued that the nature of the discourse about Hillary Clinton signals the deep struggle still taking place in society over the role of women, and the attacks against her can be seen as part of the backlash against the professional woman (p. 21). Conversations about Clinton as First Lady revolved around unresolved relationships between concepts taken as antithetical for women by those of our grandmothers generation: women versus power, work versus marriage, childrearing versus career (Jamieson, 1995, p. 22). Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1995), when discussing Clinton and the double-bind, echoes Betty Friedans assessment that Clinton is a Rorschach test for the position of women in American society. For many individuals, she embodies the struggle for women in the public sphere to maintain accepted norms of femininity while enacting typically masculine social positions (Campbell, 1998; Winfield, 1997). Online, scholars are offered a glimpse of Clintons attempts to communicate with voters in a way that conforms to the masculine persona of the presidency, but also matches the more conversational style associated with feminine social norms and the effeminate norms of mediated communication (Braden, 1995; Falk, 2008; Heldman, Carroll, & Olson, 2005; Jamieson, 1988; Jamieson, 1996; Kunin, 2008). The videos analyzed in this essay show three of the strategies Clinton attempted online, and demonstrate how the candidate worked to balance her persona and conform to the new technology. Some might question the choice to study Clintons YouTube videos: they were not as popular as some user-generated political videos and did not attract as many viewers as Obamas videos. However, Clintons videos are interesting for a couple of reasons. First, female presidential candidates in
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the past have faced difficult rhetorical choices when using televised media; Clintons campaign demonstrates how new media environments may increase or decrease the rhetorical choices of female candidates (Braden, 1995; Heldman, Carroll, & Olson, 2005; Jamieson, 1988; Kunin, 2008). Second, Clinton ran a very centralized campaign online (Cottle, 2008; Tumulty, 2008). A lot of research focus in previous election cycles has been directed toward decentralized campaign efforts, and the common wisdom is that online campaigns need to be decentralized to capitalize on the engaging features of digital technologies (Benoit, 2006; Trent & Friedenberg, 2007; Trippi, 2004). Clintons campaign went against this traditional wisdom, and this was met with a mixture of success and failure. These three videos demonstrate how certain rhetorical strategies can work with a centralized campaign and show how other rhetorical strategies may highlight the centralization to the detriment of the candidate. Finally, as mentioned above, Clinton demonstrates some of the deeply rooted tensions facing women in power today. Unfortunately, female politicians still face a series of double binds that are deeply entrenched in a set of gender stereotypes of what real men and real women are. What may be forcefulness in a mans speech is stridency in a womans (Blankenship & Robson, 1995, p. 354). These videos offer insight into how gender identity issues can be negotiated during online political campaigns. The ultimate focus of this research is on understanding how ide to develop communication for a given space (Bakhtin, 1986; Haskins, 2004). The deployment of various types of speech requires an understanding of the way utterances interact with, and are socialized within, a given space. Speech genres rely on the speaker and the listeners understanding of the appropriate speech for the appropriate moment, and this comprehension comes from reservoirs of social knowledge developed over time (Haskins, p. 58). Over time, the different spheres in which communication takes place each develops its own set of behaviors and speech patterns (Bakhtin, 1986). These behaviors and patterns are what may be termed speech genres. This conceptualization of genre, as speech patterns developing out of the culture of a space, helps to explain how the physical and technical setting of Clintons speech constrained some of the speakers choices, aided in the success of some of the videos, and caused a negative perception of some of the campaigns messages. Previous works on the genres of rhetoric in political campaigns have focused on the Aristotelian notion of genre (Aghazarian & Simons, 1986; Harpine, 2004; Morreale, 1991). This definition of genre centers on identifying the exact characteristics of a type of speech so that it can be identified without accounting for its situation. Aristotles treatment of each of the three genres of rhetoric reveals an inherent tension between the generic division according
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to fixed subject matter and reified political function on the one hand and the stylistic apparatus of a particular rhetorical performance on the other (Haskins, 2004, p. 65). This treatment of rhetoric is useful for classifying types of speech, but not for understanding the way speech is socialized by its situation. Bakhtins conception of speech genres is a much more useful tool for conceptualizing the interplay between the rhetorical strategies in the Clinton videos and media location where the videos are situated. Speech genres are different from Aristotles definition of genre in that instead of simply acquiring a list of techniques appropriate for various moments, understanding speech genres requires a combination of an accumulated cultural knowledge with a sense of kairos, the right or opportune moment, to determine the type of utterance most appropriate in a given situation (Haskins, 2004). There is no definite list of speech genres that a critic can search for when researching a text; special emphasis should be placed on the extreme heterogeneity of speech genres (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 60). The discussion of speech genre in this essay should not be construed as an attempt to identify or classify a list of genres for future researchers. Instead, the notion of genre in the Bakhtinian sense is a tool for understanding how the candidate perceives YouTube as a new media space and for conceptualizing how the technology and users perception of the technology influenced the reception of Clintons speech. Speech Genres in Clintons Democratic Primary Campaign In 1997, Clinton was advised by Dick Morris, a polling consultant, to seek out media formats where she could address the people directly (Bernstein, 2008). At the time, Morris was talking about Clinton developing a newspaper column similar to Eleanor Roosevelts My Day, and she did end up writing a reasonably successful column called Talking it Over (Bernstein, 2008). Prior to that, Clinton (2003) had experienced some success speaking directly to the public when she wrote articles for Newsweek on healthcare and welfare reform. What Morris may not have envisioned were the opportunities digital media would offer to Clinton a decade later. In previous election cycles, the mainstream news media greatly limited the amount of candidates speeches that were heard by average citizens. The average news story is only 147 seconds and an entire political speech is often cut down to a nine second sound bite (Benoit, 2006). YouTube gave Clinton the chance to address more voters directly before her speeches were run through the framing and sound biting process, and throughout the campaign she used this technology to showcase different parts of her persona and her political positions.1 For Clintons campaign team, the goal was not to introduce the candidate to the public but to reintroduce her (Felchner, 2007). There was so much tension surrounding her politically, that her biggest challenge during the election was to create a consistent, identifiable
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image (Braden, 1995; Falk, 2008; Felchner, 2007; Heldman, Carroll, & Olson, 2005; Jamieson, 1988; Jamieson, 1996; Kunin, 2008). This media form created a space for the public to reacquaint themselves with her. New media spaces open up many possibilities for political candidates seeking to reach voters and get their ideas out to citizens. However, it is important to recognize that just as social norms have developed for politicians speaking to citizens through newspapers, radio, and television, new media environments should be seen as communication spheres with constantly developing expectations (Burgess & Green, 2009; Jamieson, 1988; Jenkins, 2006; Selnow, 1998; Warnick, 2007). It is too simplistic to discuss YouTube as a purely unfiltered space. The candidate can post their original video without having to worry that on the site the news media will edit it down to an 18-word sound bite. However, once it is posted, the video can be filtered in multiple ways as it circulates through popular discourse. When dealing with the myriad of modern media options there are almost an infinite number of filters that can be discussed. This essay will focus on two specific filters that worked to socialize the candidates discourse. First of all, viewers place social filters and their own personal filters on everything they see and hear. Even if technology allows candidates to address voters directly, there must be an awareness of the extreme social and historical heteroglossia of speech (Bakhtin, 1929/1984). Heteroglossia refers to the many distinct ways a word or utterance is deployed by different speakers throughout a society and at different points in history. This facet of speech will always lead to some gap between the speakers and the listeners understandings of the utterance (Bakhtin, 1986). Second, the technology on the site where the video is located functions as a filter for the speech (Burgess & Green, 2009). The Clinton campaign site, which was the exclusive location of early videos, contained no visible user-feedback mechanisms: no comments section, no ratings section, and no view count. This is in contrast with the YouTube site, a later host for the videos, which contains multiple options for users to interact with and around the campaign media. The technology, or in some cases the lack of technology, functions as a social cue to the speaker and the viewer. This social cue is used in the interpretation of the candidates speech, and in some cases the cues given by the technology can give the appearance of contradicting the speakers message.

Im In! Approaching the Campaign as a Dialogue

When Clinton first started her online video campaign, she seemed to be taking Dick Morris advice literally and using the Internet as a place where she could be seen unfiltered. This meant only posting videos to her
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Web site and avoiding posting them to more interactive sites like YouTube. The videos created by the Clinton campaign in January would not be posted to YouTube until February and were only posted there after some very public complaints by site users (Rigby, 2008; Winograd & Hais, 2008). The problem with this choice was that the videos were supposed to take advantage of the conversational format of the Internet, but the section of her Web site where the videos were posted did not offer any conversational functions or features. Site users complained that their interactions with the candidate were being screened by the campaign (Rigby, 2008; Winograd & Hais, 2008). The issues present in the early campaign videos, such as the Let the Conversation Begin and the Hillcasts series, are exemplified by Clintons first campaign video Im in! Clinton announced her candidacy on January 20th, 2007, using a Webcast from her site. Obama and Clinton were the first to take advantage of the potential of online video in this election, announcing their candidacies simultaneously on the Internet and television (Dalton, 2007; Duman & Locher, 2008). An email from Clintons campaign the day after the announcement quoted several positive reviews. NPRs Mara Liasson said the video setting looked like her [Clintons] living room in Chappaqua, and she came across as very warm and engaging. She was sitting on this big comfy sofa talking in a very conversational tone (Quoted in Hillary Clinton, personal correspondence, January 21, 2007). A Newsweek reporter, in February, echoed Liassons sentiments, saying that on the Web, Hillary offered herself as an openhearted neighbor, eager to bond over coffee (Fineman, 2007, p. 40). These quotes could have described several of the early videos that were posted to the Clinton Web site. This portrayal of Clinton seems to be a response to previous media representations of the candidate as hard, cold, or masculine, a persona Clinton would have to battle throughout the campaign (Parry-Giles & Parry-Giles, 1996). In the video, Clinton tells the audience: Im not just starting a campaign, Im beginning a conversation. Clintons use of the announcement video to frame the campaign as a conversation encountered several issues. Most of these issues were created by a conflict between visual cues, in the video and on the website, and the rhetorical choices as represented in the speech genres. All communication spheres have certain expectations. By portraying the setting of this video as the domestic sphere, the campaign created in the audience a set of expectations for Clintons speaking style. While communication in the domestic sphere may have a wide range of flexibility, there is a sense that this communication will be more personal and intimate than communication in public spaces. The expectation of intimacy works with the framing of the campaign as a conversation between citizens and
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the candidate. Additionally, Clinton incorporates aspects of feminine style into her speech, which reinforces these expectations. Clintons speech emphasizes the role of the audience in the process, brings domestic issues to the forefront, and uses anecdotes from her life as evidence for her policy choices. These are all traditional elements of feminine style, which originated out of womens communication in the domestic sphere and would naturally complement the setting shown in the video and the larger tradition of campaign videos (Blankenship & Robson, 1995; Campbell, 1989; Dow & Tonn, 1993; Parry-Giles & Parry-Giles, 1996). Elements of feminine style come out of scholarly work on how the social construct of gender influences public address (Blankenship & Robson, 1995). While they are directly related to modes of communication common to the private sphere, they are not exclusive to female candidates. Additionally, not all speakers will adopt the gendered characteristics of speech traditionally associated with their sex, but as their speech is socialized within larger cultural context they may be held accountable for choices that fall outside social norms (Blankenship & Robson, 1995; Jamieson, 1996). This may reflect on the persuasive capabilities of their speech. Stylistic cues often work with setting to create generic expectations (Bakhtin, 1986). Unfortunately, other aspects of the candidates communication seem out of place in this space and more appropriate to a courtroom. As a rhetor, Clinton often speaks in a forensic style, drawing on her early career as a lawyer. According to Karlyn Kohr Campbell (1998), in the past Clinton used elements of feminine style in her speech, but ultimately her speeches more closely resemble judicial or forensic rhetoric. As she discusses her campaign platform, Clinton talks about citizenship as a bargain, a legal term; she vows to renew the promise of America, our basic bargain, that no matter who you are or where you live, if you work hard and play by the rules you can build a good life for yourself and your family.2 While Clinton is talking about having a conversation, her language and tone are more indicative of legal discourse. Bakhtin (1986, p. 80) points out that many people who have an excellent command of a language often feel quite helpless in certain spheres of communication precisely because they do not have a practical command of the generic forms used in the given spheres. One gets the sense these videos are the beginning of a debate, not a dialogue, and this form of speech seems out of place within the domestic sphere. Because Clinton seems out of place in this sphere, it gives the effect of making her seem rehearsed and inauthentic. In the video announcing the campaign, the candidate says she wants to talk to citizens, but the Web site offered no visible way for citizens to talk back. Visually, the video is surrounded by links for site users to learn more about
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Clinton, but the only contribution users are invited to make is their support. This gave the impression that Clinton was conversing at viewers instead of with viewers. The issue here can be seen as a conflict between primary and secondary speech genres. Primary speech genres are simple genres that are picked up through socialization to various types of discourse (Bakhtin, 1986). Secondary speech genres are more complex and comparatively highly developed and organized cultural communication (primarily written) that is artistic, scientific, sociopolitical, and so on (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 62). Bakhtin (1986) also pointed out that secondary speech genres often contain primary speech genres, but within secondary genres, primary genres lose their immediate relation to actual reality and to the real utterances of others (p. 62). In the case of the video Im In, the campaign uses the secondary genre of political video, which has its own developed set of cultural expectations, as the setting for utterances which attempt to invoke conventions of the primary speech genre of an intimate dialogue. What the campaign fails to take into account is that the primary genre of dialogue is also being situated within the secondary genre of online communication. These two secondary genres point to different interpretations of the primary genre. Within the setting of the political video the Clinton campaign may have felt it appropriate to eliminate some of the social conventions of a dialogue. In the past, political speech on television invited a more personal, self-disclosing style that draws public discourse out of a private self (Jamieson, 1988, p. 84). However, on television, as a technological location, the conversational style allowed the speaker to create a sense of intimacy without the audience having a real expectation of two-way discourse (Jamieson, 1988; Parry-Giles & Parry-Giles, 1996). So, within the secondary genre of political video as it was understood before the Internet, the primary genre of dialogue lost its connection to its typical social form (Jamieson, 1988; Parry-Giles & Parry-Giles, 1996). However, online communication can also be seen as a secondary speech genre, and when the primary genre of dialogue is placed in that context there is an expectation it will maintain some of its traditional meaning. Individuals may have encountered political communication online in the settings of political blogs or message boards, all places where they have the ability to respond to the opinions with which they are presented. So, when Clinton says she is initiating a dialogue within the context of the secondary genre of the Internet, there is some expectation that users will have a place to provide their feedback and make comments. It could be argued that presidential campaign videos on YouTube were new in the 2008 election cycle, and there was not a lot of time for citizens to have developed expectations (Duman & Locher, 2008). However, site users did have previous experiences of online communication
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to draw on when reading the rhetorical form (Burgess & Green, 2009; Duman & Locher, 2008). The expectations associated with the form of the genre of dialogue and the genre of online communication conflicted with the genre of the political video. This created a gap between the campaigns and the users understandings of the utterance. The tone and style of Clintons speech became fodder for at least one individual opposed to the campaign. Footage from Clintons video Let the Conversation Begin was used to make a mash-up video called Clinton 1984, or Vote Different, that received many more hits than any of Clintons campaign videos (Viral Politics, 2007). The video used the popular 1984 Super Bowl commercial, Apple 1984, directed by Ridley Scott for the Apple Corporation. In the mash-up version of the video, the image of David Graham as the talking head of big brother is replaced by Clintons Let the Conversation Begin video. The implication here is that Clintons campaign videos are really just an attempt at brainwashing. The video was made by Phil deVillas in March 2007 and was viewed over 3 million times in the first month (Winograd & Hais, 2008). That is 500 times as many views as the original Clinton video used in the mash-up. This user-generated viral video highlights the sense of Clintons authoritarian speaking style that even the cozy backdrop of her living room could not soften.3 The video points to Clintons violation of generic expectations. By showing her talking at the audience, the video highlights the candidates failure to create an authentic dialogue. The early rhetorical choices made in the campaign reflected Clintons misunderstanding of the persuasive nature of digital environments. The major problem with many of the early Clinton campaign videos was incompatibility. Clintons speech was incompatible with the private sphere environment where it was filmed and with the technology that was used to deliver it to voters. The candidates early videos repeat a mistake that Internet campaigns have been making since 1996; Clinton treated the Web as a place to publish videos instead of a fully interactive social networking platform (Benoit, 2006; Carlson & Strandberg, 2008; Selnow, 1998). Interactivity is a large part of what makes digital technologies persuasive, and when users feel limited by a site it causes negative feelings (Fogg, 2003; Stromer-Galley & Foot, 2002; Warnick, 2007). Clinton attempts to give audience members a presence within the text, but the technological environment where the speeches were delivered (the campaign site) contradicted her statements. The limitations of the official campaign site, and the speech that drew attention to those limitations, caused hostility toward the Clinton campaign (Winograd & Hais, 2008). The hostility prompted the candidate to move the videos to YouTube, and begin using rhetorical styles that made use of the digital environment. Those later videos seem to overcome
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Clintons compatibility problem.

Sopranos Parody: Using Strategic Ambiguity

At the early stages of the campaign, reporters commented that Clintons husbands role in the race made people nervous: are citizens voting for Bill or Hillary (Greider, 2007)? Bill Clintons involvement in the campaign created what, for the Clintons, was an old problem: the couples perceived power tradeoff (Anderson, 2002; Kelly, 2001; Lizza, 2007; Parry-Giles, 2000; Trent & Short-Thompson, 2003; Troy, 2000). When Bill and Hillary Clinton have campaigned together in the past, there has always been speculation about who is in control (Anderson, 2002; Kelly, 2001; Lizza, 2007; Parry-Giles, 2000; Trent & Short-Thompson, 2003; Troy, 2000).4 However, if Bill Clinton were absent from the campaign, this would have raised suspicions about whether or not he supported his wifes candidacy. In the Sopranos parody video, Clinton responded to these issues using a combination of humor and strategic ambiguity, or what Robert Hariman (2008) refers to as comic doubling (p. 255). The strategic ambiguity in this text is derived from the double-voiced discourse present in the video. When Bakhtin (1929/1984; 1986) discussed the utterance, he noted the presence of several cultural forces acting on an utterance at any one time. He argued that any utterance cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue (Bakhtin, 1929/1984, p. 276). Parody is the result of two active voices within a double-voiced text; the simultaneous and conflicting nature of the voices leads to what Bakhtin (1929/1984) calls the hidden polemic. Scheckels (1997) argues that in some instances, feminine style can represent a special case of double-voicedness. Double-voicedness, in relationship to feminine style, is a discourse in which the overtoftentimes derived from the dominant cultureis subverted by a stated or implied other messagea kind of parody frequently used by post-modern women in which a narrative pattern defined by the patriarchy is used but undermined (Scheckels, 1997, p. 57). This type of discourse is ambiguous in that it is constantly commenting on itself. There is no overt meaning for the text, only multiple interpretations of the text. The ability to construct multiple interpretations of a singular text is how the parodic style works with the generic constraints of digital technology. In digital spaces identity is often fragmented, creating multiple interpretations of both the speaker and the text; parody fragments the voice of the speaker and works with the disjointed nature of digital speech (Warnick, 1998; 2007). While Clintons early campaign videos may have failed, Clintons video parodying the Sopranos was the first campaign video from any of the
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candidates official campaigns to be called a viral video (Gloede, 2007). The idea for the Sopranos parody video was conceived by Mandy Grunwald, Jimmy Siegel, and Danny Levinson (Gloede, 2007). These three are among many of the well-established PR strategists the campaign employed (Berman, 2007). The campaign used this video to generate excitement about the contest to choose a campaign song. In the scene from the original Sopranos episode, Tony meets his wife Carmela, his son A.J., and his daughter Meadow at a local diner. Carmela arrives first and then Tony. Tony and A.J. talk about the sons new job, and the three eat onion rings that Tony has ordered for the table. Meadow is shown outside trying to parallel park, and she enters the restaurant last just before the scene cuts to black. In the parody, Bill alternately plays the roles of Carmela and Tony Soprano, and Hillary alternates between playing A.J. and Tony Soprano. The presence of Chelsea Clinton in the video is implied by the image of a car outside trying to parallel park. From the dialogue, the audience is led to believe she is the driver.5 The Clintons choice to take on the role of the fictional mob family functions as a response to the media dialogue surrounding the couples position as Washington Powerbrokers. The double-voiced nature of the parody allowed the candidate to take on this powerful role and simultaneously mock the conspiracy theories that have plagued her since she was First Lady. On the one hand, taking on the role of the famous mobster allows Clinton to say: yes, I am this powerful. On the other hand, the humorous nature of the video allows Clinton to poke fun at individuals who propagate conspiracy theories about the Clintons power. At one point during the video, Clinton even stares down a potential mobster eating lunch at the counter. This image can be read as a statement about Clintons ability to take on the role as a powerful leader. One critical difference between the Sopranos scene and the Clinton video is the way the sex-roles are played out. On the Sopranos, Tony talks to his son A.J. about his new job, and A.J. complains that it is monotonous. Then, he stops complaining and quotes his dads advice to focus on the good times. In the Clinton video, Bill asked Hillary about the campaign, her current job, and she responds: well, like you always say, focus on the good times. In that moment, Bill takes on the role of the father and Hillary the son. There is a symbolism there for passing the torch from father to son, as Hillary travels down the same road Bill took sixteen years ago. At this point in the scene, Hillary does take on a subordinate role, but she is still parodying the role of the male character. Later in the video, Hillary takes on the role of the dominant character when she tells Bill she has ordered the food for the table: carrot sticks. In the original scene, Tony ordered onion rings for the table. When Bill complains about the carrot sticks, Hillary says she is looking out for him.
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The parody in this video gives voters a sense of the couples relationship. Bill is still offering advice to Hillary, even though he has passed the torch on to her, and Hillary is looking out for Bill, even as she is on the campaign trail. It comments on the positive nature of their relationship without directly answering media speculations. This type of ambiguity as a rhetorical strategy has many advantages in digital spaces. Clinton had used parody in the past to deal with difficult political issues. While she was First Lady, she performed twice at Washingtons annual Gridiron Dinner, an event where the President, First Lady, and members of the press all perform musical numbers and skits (Clinton, 2003). In 1994, Hillary and Bill did a skit together parodying the Harry and Louise healthcare commercials. The following year, Clinton performed in a parody of the film Forrest Gump, and changed hairstyles in every scene to comment on the press fascination with her appearance (Clinton, 2003). Both performances received standing ovations. Parody has been a comfortable way for Clinton to comment on complicated gender issues. Scheckels (1997) noted that double-voiced discourse allows the feminist writer to critique and call into question culture as if it were a text. In fact, the use of double-voiced discourse becomes metonymic for a more difficult-to-verbalize critique and subversion of cultural norms (p. 58). Clintons parody calls into question cultural norms about the relationship between husband and wife, and allows the candidate to critique the discussions of the gender roles involved in the image of the traditional power couple. By acting out their partnership in this way, the Clintons externalize their relationship for public discussion; through the shifts, slippage, and silliness of parodythe prior text become(s) an obviously contrived performance (Hariman, 2008, p. 256). Online, the invitation to interpret a text becomes an invitation to dialogue. Using the Internet to release the parody gave Clinton the opportunity to deal with some of the personal issues of her campaign while bypassing traditional broadcast media. Broadcast media relies on a one-to-many format that has the potential to stifle citizens political conversations (McChensey, 2000). In contrast, on YouTube, the video interface is designed to showcase the potential for interaction (Burgess & Green, 2009). The video is framed by user comments, user ratings, and other videos that relate to the topic. The interface, if it is understood as a text, is a multi-voiced text: it reflects the input of the video creator, the site creator, and the site users. In this space, the Sopranos video not only critiques the gendered conversations that have troubled the Clinton campaign, it invites the users to engage in the construction and interpretation of the text and participate in the critical process. Parody encourages a level of interactivity that was missing in Clintons previous videos; the doubleDavisson- I m In!: Hillary Clintons ...

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voicedness of parody and the multi-voicedness of YouTube work together to promote dialogue. The ambiguity of the text calls on the viewers to bring in their own knowledge of cultural symbols, such as the actual episode of The Sopranos, to complete text (Hariman, 2008; Warnick, 1998; 2001; 2007). Clinton achieves the illusion of interactivity here, where she failed in previous videos. Ultimately, the style of this video seems more appropriate to the generic constraints of the communication sphere.

Online, Clinton released several videos aimed at the policy issues of specific voting groups. These videos are interesting because, while they were not the most popular videos Clinton released during her campaign, they do demonstrate the candidates attempt to respond to the needs of certain communities. The campaign made videos addressing the policy concerns of college students, nurses, beauticians, and several other groups. This shows a critical adaptation to online political campaigning. Anderson (2006) argues that the architecture of the Internet relies primarily on small sites and small groups of people spread out throughout the Web. Offline, stores like WalMart are successful because they sell fewer types of products but target large audiences. Online, the strategy needs to be reversed: making more product and reaching out to smaller audiences (Anderson, 2006). The same can be said for building a voting base. Offline, mass media political campaigns tend to put more money into creating fewer commercials designed for larger audiences (Benoit, 2006; Selnow, 1998; Trippi, 2004). This is the broadcast approach to political campaigns. Online, candidates need to focus less on the one-tomany format, and think more about how their messages operate within digital communities. Videos like the Sopranos parody are good for creating large-scale awareness of the campaign online because humorous videos on sites like YouTube tend to generate a lot of views. However, to engender long-term support the candidate must find a way to identify herself with the personal interests of individual supporters. One way to do this is to situate her policy platforms in relationship to the interests of specific voting groups. Small groups are critical during elections because most voters form political decisions in the context of networks and groups. Apartment buildings, neighborhoods, offices, congregations, and classrooms assemble people into groups embedded with norms, informal rules of behavior, standards of beliefs, and patterns of interaction (Selnow, 1998, p. 13; see also Lenart, 1994; Smith, 1966). Research has shown that while the mainstream media may set the agenda for political conversation, it is in small groups and interpersonal interactions that
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most individuals process the information they are given and form opinions (Druckman & Nelson, 2003; Druckman, 2004; Hagen & Wasko, 2000; Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955; McClurg, 2006a; McClurg, 2006b). Online, candidates have the chance to be more specific in their messages by targeting precise voting groups. It is easy to think of targeting voting groups as an attempt for candidates to be deceptive; the term may bring to mind images of politicians who alter their persona for each group they address. This is not that kind of speech adaptation. If Clinton created a different version of herself for each group she addressed online, she would quickly get caught. The Web is not an anonymous space for a politician. In the age of convergence culture, political missteps online are quickly noticed and publicized by offline media (Burgess & Green, 2009; Jenkins, 2006). The goal of reaching out to different voting groups online is to provide each group with an understanding of how the candidates overall policy agenda impacts them personally. Voters have a higher level of satisfaction with candidates online when they are able to find information specific to their personal policy interests (Stromer-Galley & Foot, 2002). These videos allow candidates to meet that need. In Ask Hillary, the candidate targets college age supporters. Clinton is shown on her campaign bus responding to questions from voters posts on Facebook, and this is interspersed with college students talking about Clintons appeal as a future president. This video starts with Chelsea and Hillary on the campaign trail shaking hands with lots of college-age voters.6 An African American teen says, We are all supporters, my best friend and I, my family, we are all supporters of Hillary. Similar testimonials are used throughout the video to help Clinton identify her policies with real voters. One interesting example is when Clinton talks about her plan for helping students pay for college. Clintons answer is reinforced by testimony from college students talking about their problems paying off their debt and how Clintons plan would solve their problems: Currently my student loan payments are more than my rent. Hillarys plan for helping students repay their student loans and get a higher education really meant a lot to me. The candidate uses the video format to relate her policy experience with the day-to-day problems of her voting base. The film techniques used in this video seem to exhibit a form of what Bakhtin (1929/1984) referred to as polyphony. Bakhtin (1929/1984) used the notion of polyphony to discuss the way discourse functions in the work of Dostoyevsky. Within the novels of Dostoyevsky, there are often multiple voices, each of which exhibits agency separate from that of the author, and these voices function together to create a single text. The presence of a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses (Bakhtin, 1929/1984,
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p. 6) gives the text a sense of multi-voicedness that is lacking in some novels. This form of multi-voicedness is separate from the active double-voicedness of parody in that it contains no hidden polemic. The video portrays individuals stating their own personal narratives and Clinton discussing the various policy initiatives of the campaign. All voices in the text maintain an agency and individual consciousness throughout the text. Additionally, the voices work together under the guise of a single text. The persuasiveness of this technique comes in part from the sense of agency maintained by all individuals involved. Even if a voter does not identify with Clinton directly, they are offered images of other fully realized, individual characters with whom they may identify. These independent agents in the text help the viewers to better locate themselves in relationship to the candidate. This video maintains the multi-voicedness of the Sopranos parody, and also demonstrates the campaign gaining a greater awareness of the importance of communication spheres. This is demonstrated in part by the choice to place Clinton on the bus answering questions. In the early videos from the campaign, the portrayal of the candidate at home on her couch seemed to conflict with her rhetorical style. In this video, Clinton is shown on the campaign trail answering policy questions. The rhetorical style the candidate uses when answering questions seems very appropriate for her location. This gives Clinton a sense of authenticity she lacked in the early videos. Additionally, the campaign makes better use of the technology as a communication sphere in this video. In the early videos, the campaign had a difficulty dealing with asynchronous nature of video conversation. The viewers were promised a dialogue but the way communication was filtered violated viewer expectations. For this video, individuals were invited to post questions on Facebook and told that some questions would be chosen for the video and others would not. This created a set of viewer expectations that were more in line with the way the campaign was operating. Overall, this use of the technology received a better audience response. This video was among the strongest in Clintons campaign because it made use of the forensic style, which the candidate has had success with in the past. As mentioned earlier in the essay, this is the style that the candidate has traditionally been the most comfortable with, and in these videos, Clinton really seems like she is at her best when she is on the campaign trail talking about her policies. Traditionally, this speaking style has made Clinton look too severe. However, when the forensic style is juxtaposed with images of individuals offering personal testimony, Clintons policies seem more accessible. This is the persuasiveness of polyphony. These videos make use of elements of feminine style by relying on personal testimony and narrative as evidence,
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while allowing Clinton to continue to speak in the forensic style where she is most natural. Additionally, the combination of elements of feminine style and forensic style allows the candidate to access feminine social norms while still speaking in a form that is considered presidential.

New media technologies offer candidates a chance to speak directly to voters, relatively unfiltered, and test out new strategies for overcoming boundaries to public office. With the Clinton campaign, one can see that while early attempts to use the technology failed, later attempts involving parody and polyphony demonstrated some of the possibilities and potential of these emerging campaign tools. Clintons early campaign videos focused on the campaign as a dialogue. Early videos were supposed to give the impression of a conversation with supporters, but the campaigns lack of interactive technology made the dialogue appear inauthentic. Clinton has always worked to control media coverage of her and her husband, and because of this she did not adapt well to the new medium at first (Bernstein, 2008; Wheaton, 2007; Winograd & Hais, 2008). This may have cost her a lot during the campaign: her overall inability to freely embrace the free-form chaos of online campaigning eventually caused the campaign to lose its biggest assetthe appearance of inevitability (Winograd & Hais, 2008, p. 185). In later videos, Clintons use of parody and polyphony allowed the candidate to simulate forms of interactivity with her rhetoric. This showed a critical adaptation to new media rhetorical spaces. When Clinton entered the primary race, she said she was In it to win it, and for a while that seemed a distinct possibility. However, the irony is that Senator Clinton is the first woman to be qualified for the presidencybut having reached this threshold, she is considered by some to be too qualified, too scripted, too same old (Kunin, 2008, p. 165). The advantage Clinton held early on in the campaign was the impression that she was the inevitable winner. This impression turned into a problem later in the campaign as it appeared she believed she was entitled to win (Alter, 2008). Many individuals began to view Clinton as part of the Washington establishment, and the focus of the Democratic Party was on moving away from the establishment. Although Clinton did not win the election, her rhetorical missteps and later adaptations to YouTube as a communication sphere offers insight to future politicians attempting to understand the culture of this space. Overall, the nearly 18 million votes Clinton received demonstrate the progress female candidates have made, and her failures may offer valuable information for the candidates who follow in her footsteps.
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1.The primary focus of the rhetorical analysis in this essay is the speeches as they were situated within the YouTube site. This is not meant to downplay the importance of the role of the mainstream media in picking up, airing, and critiquing these videos. Jenkins (2006) argues that it is important to understand that we live in a convergence culture where texts often flow from one medium to the next. Mainstream media outlets aired many of Clintons YouTube videos. Just as in previous election cycles with campaign ads, during the 2008 election campaign videos from YouTube were routinely replayed and critiqued by the mainstream news media (Jamieson, 1988). In order to give some depth to the discussion of the interaction between Clintons rhetoric and the digital technology used to distribute it, this project will be limited to an analysis of the videos as they were situated on the campaign site and the YouTube site. However, future researcher may want to explore the role of the mainstream news media in filtering and redistributing these campaign videos. Additionally, for more information on media framing of Hillary Clinton prior to the 2008 election see Parry-Giles (2000). 2.Some might remember the phrase basic bargain from Bill Clintons 1996 Democratic National Convention speech. However, the notion of bargaining is a common trope in the rhetoric of the Democratic Party that goes back further than either of the Clintons. The language Clinton uses here has a long history. Candidates for the Democratic party often discuss their platforms as deals or bargains, and this language also manifest itself in partys platform and legislative agenda (Gerring, 1997; 2001). 3.This impression was further reinforced by press commentary during those early months. Early on in Clintons campaign, there was a sense that she
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would not listen to comments from individuals outside the campaign (Wolffe, Bailey, Darman & Clift, 2007). 4. Clinton said during his campaign in 1992 that with Bill and Hillary you buy one, get one free (Bernstein, 2008; Clinton, 2003; Kelly, 2001). The idea of a Co-Presidency seemed appealing to the Clintons, but caused a lot of negative attention from the press about an unelected official holding so much power (Bernstein, 2008; Clinton, 2003; Kelly, 2001). 5. The choice for Chelsea not to appear in the video may be a reflection of the candidates constant attempts to keep her daughter out of the media spotlight (Bernstein, 2008; Clinton, 2003). 6. This is one of the only videos where Chelsea Clinton makes an appearance. In June of 2007, there had been controversy over Chelseas role on the campaign trail, especially since Clinton wanted to shelter her 27-yearold daughter from negative media attention (Bedard, 2007; Clinton, 2003). In February of 2008, Chelsea Clinton increased her role in her mothers campaign, giving more speeches and becoming more visible (Campo-Flores, Setoodeh, Brant & Hansen, 2008).

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