“I’m In!”: Hillary Clinton’s 2008 Democratic Primary Campaign on You Tube

Abstract

In 2008, during the Democratic Primary, Hillary Clinton posted 353 campaign videos to YouTube. Each of these campaign videos demonstrated the candidate’s 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 Bakhtin’s notion of speech genres to discuss the rhetorical strategies present in three of Clinton’s 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.