When Hillary Clinton announced she was running for president in an online video, it was a gesture towards the undeniable fact that candidates must make a minimal effort online, and must at the very least pay lip service to the netroots and the political blogosphere. As David Weinberger recently pointed out, although Hillary calls her campaign a conversation, the execution actually suggests "a TV-style interview answering safe questions with safer answers."

Similarly, Dan Gillmor wonders if Hillary's "conversation" rhetoric is all a joke:

Was this a joke? Clinton’s alleged conversations with America have been so entirely scripted as to be laughable.

If this is her idea of changing politics in a Webby way, we’re not making much progress.

And Frank Rich at the New York Times says that "the theatrics of her fledgling campaign are already echoing the content" (and he also thinks she must be joking!):

Last week she conducted three online Web chats that she billed as opportunities for voters to see her “in an unfiltered way.” Surely she was kidding. Everything was filtered, from the phony living-room set to the appearance of a “campaign blogger” who wasn’t blogging to the softball questions and canned responses.

Despite this atmosphere of skepticism, a recent post from PoliticsOnline's PoliticsBlog featured the headline, "On the Web, Clinton Leads the Pack." Leads the pack in what? According the blog,

Beginning with an e-announcement last weekend, Clinton followed up strong with three live web chats this week as well as a town hall meeting in cyberspace.

Through video streamed on her Web site, for a half-hour Clinton answered about a dozen queries on each of three evenings this week. Questions ranged from "What is your favorite movie?" to "Do you plan on ending our dependence on foreign oil?"

Clinton also used the Yahoo Answers service to ask voters: ``Based on your own family's experience, what do you think we should do to improve health care in America?'” By 5 p.m. Pacific time, Clinton had gotten more than 33,000 answers, making her question the second-most popular in the history of Yahoo Answers.

These moves are what every candidate should be doing, regardless of their web-savviness. Clinton isn't breaking ground in any way. Answering safe, pre-picked questions in a controlled video that you post online and asking people to send their opinions on health care to Yahoo Answers is not what the new notion of online campaigning is about -- in fact, it's a pretty good example the old top-down, hyper-controlled notion of the web, and of traditional media campaigns in general.

There's no blog yet on her campaign site (the blog page says it's coming soon), and in fact there's no room for uncontrolled conversation among supporters at all.

If we were writing about Clinton, our headline would be "On the Web, Clinton Safely in the Middle of the Pack."

Tags: capitol hill, frank rich, hillary clinton, John Edwards, politicsonline, yahoo

2008 | Campaigns & Elections | Clinton
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