"I'm in!": Hillary Clinton's 2008 Democratic Primary Campaign on Youtube (Essay‪)‬

Campaign on YouTube In 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 Clinton's victory inevitable (Chait, 2007). In the Democratic Primary, Clinton received 17,267,658 votes, only 166,000 votes less than the victor, Barack 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 candidate's political platform and develop her online persona. Hillary Clinton posted 353 videos to YouTube[TM] during her 18-month campaign and continued to post videos after she lost the primary. YouTube[TM] 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 campaign's videos in order to understand how the technology on the YouTube[TM] site socialized the candidate's speech and influenced citizens' interpretations of the campaign.