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LOS ANGELES - It's the most striking, perhaps most powerful advert to come out of the American presidential campaign to date: a 74-second spot in which Hillary Clinton, recast as Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984, spouts platitudes from a giant screen while her worker-drone supporters march in
lockstep to offer their support.
The advert is a dramatic pitch for Clinton's most dangerous rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama, and has become the talk of the political punditry.
But the most striking of all is that the advert did not originate with the Obama campaign and required no political campaign money to produce or distribute.
Rather, it was made by a Obama supporter - nobody seems to know exactly who - working with a laptop and a suite of video editing software, who then posted his handiwork on YouTube, the popular video-sharing website, where it went viral all by itself.
The ad is a clever "mash-up" - or re-edit - of a famous television spot for Apple computers which ran on network television during the 1984 Superbowl, the culmination of the annual American football season.
In the original, directed by Ridley Scott, a young woman athlete hurls a hammer at the Big Brother screen and causes it to explode - symbolising the way in which Apple hoped its then brand-new Macintosh computers would topple the competition.
In the advert's revamped form, it is the image of Hillary that explodes, and the young athlete sports an Obama 2008 logo on her shirt.
Whether or not it changes any minds, the advert marks a radical devolution in the way politics is now conducted in the United States and suggests next year's campaign could be an uncontrolled, and uncontrollable, free-for-all in which ordinary citizens could hold as much sway as fancy consultants and advertising agencies lobbying the main candidates for their business.
It also suggests that the tens of millions of dollars Clinton is expected to raise from her well-stuffed electronic Rolodex might not go quite as far as she might have hoped - especially if the widely noted grassroots suspicion of her candidacy finds equally compelling form in future citizen advertising between now and the height of primary season in just under a year's time.
As the advert itself says as its final images dissolve: "On Jan. 14, the Democratic primary will begin. And you'll see why 2008 won't be like 1984."
Several political analysts have started talking excitedly about a whole new paradigm in campaigning. Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute in San Francisco, told the San Francisco Chronicle he foresaw "a new era, a new wave of politics".
"It's about the end of the broadcast era," he said.
In the past, campaign managers have prided themselves on their ability to control the message and target the thin sliver of voters they need to put their candidate over the top. Now, however, it seems all bets are off. Candidates can either benefit from the creative handiwork of their supporters, or suffer if that handiwork proves embarrassing.
Popular sentiment - in this case, directed at Hillary Clinton - can force the political debate in directions the candidates themselves may have no desire to take it.
Howard Dean's insurgent presidential campaign in 2004 arguably started off the digital devolution of American politics, since he invited his supporters to do their own independent networking and campaigning via the internet.
Last year's mid-terms saw extensive use of the web to broadcast adverts and revealing clips of candidates either distinguishing or embarrassing themselves.
The internet also turned many key races into national spectacles as footage reached a far wider audience than before.
Dirty Tactics In Battle For Votes
Casting Hillary Clinton as Big Brother is the latest in a long tradition of negative ads that transformed political campaigning in the US. Some include:
The notorious 1964 ad attacking the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater as a dangerous bomb-thrower, in which a daisy being plucked by a young girl transformed into a nuclear mushroom cloud. The ad helped the incumbent President, Lyndon Johnson, win re-election by a landslide.
The 1988 ad in which Michael Dukakis, the Democratic presidential candidate, was blamed for releasing a violent criminal called Willie Horton and giving him the opportunity to commit a rape and armed robbery. The ad, dreamt up by George Bush snr's consultant, Lee Atwater, proved the coup de grace to the Dukakis campaign.
The 2004 campaign against John Kerry by the so-called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth", a group of Bush supporters who distorted Kerry's Vietnam service record to suggest he was a coward under fire. The campaign, conducted independently of the Bush effort, did not sink Kerry, but he never entirely recovered from it.
