By Andrew Adam Newman

Monday, June 4, 2007
NEW YORK: When Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton asked YouTube viewers to vote on a theme song for her presidential campaign, she certainly got the attention she wanted - and a whole lot of jokes at her expense.

While her campaign provided a list of upbeat songs to choose from - like "I'm a Believer" and "Beautiful Day" - her detractors suggested alternatives like "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" and "Cold as Ice."

On May 16, the campaign uploaded a video in which Clinton, Democrat of New York, says, in a mock serious tone, "I want to know what you're thinking on one of the most important questions of this campaign," then directs viewers to hillaryclinton.com to vote on one of her staff's nine song choices (or suggest others). The clip concludes with some mild self-deprecation, with brief footage of Clinton vocally mangling the national anthem.

On May 24, she posted another video to YouTube, announcing that voters had narrowed the original list to five (including "Rock This Country!" by Shania Twain and "Suddenly I See" by KT Tunstall), and that five of the top write-in suggestions also were now contenders (including "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" by The Police and "You and I" by Celine Dion).

The campaign is expected to close the second round of voting and announce the winning song this week.

"The numbers are insane," Peter Daou, the Clinton campaign Internet director, said of the response. Each video has been viewed on either YouTube or the campaign site more than 900,000 times, and more than 100,000 votes were cast in the first round, he said.

Tech President, a blog about candidates' Internet exposure, credited Clinton's campaign song videos with "helping her dethrone Senator Barack Obama as the candidate with the most YouTube buzz."

But the contest also has functioned as a kick-me sign. Rush Limbaugh suggested a theme song of Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back"; on "The Chris Matthews Show" on NBC, David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, suggested Hall and Oates's "Maneater"; on the Web site Townhall.com, Jon Sanders suggested REM's "It's the End of the World as We Know It" and Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction."

Other media observers are holding their own contests. On The New Republic's Web site, Michael Crowley, a senior editor at the magazine, asked readers for their own suggestions, which yielded The Rolling Stones's "She's So Cold," Foreigner's "Cold as Ice," and Lou Reed's "Vicious."

Crowley said in a telephone interview that while he was inclined to mock the contest, he did see some value to it for the campaign.

"She's sort of the embodiment in modern American politics of control-freakery and microcalculation, but the videos were fun and she seemed likable and funny, and she doesn't get many opportunities to come across that way," Crowley said.

"There are a lot of spoofs, and we take it in good fun," said Daou, of the Clinton campaign. "When you invite people to interact, people from all across the political spectrum will interact, and that's the nature of the contest and it wasn't unexpected."

Indeed, he pointed out, Clinton's second YouTube video included pieces from clips that YouTube users had submitted in response to the first, including one unidentified man saying, "Are you freaking kidding me?" and another saying "This is ridiculous."

Daou said that the write-in song candidates, which all carried positive themes, were not cherry-picked but were in fact the most popular. "This is about the will of the people," he said.

But rock lyrics are not known for being entirely on-message all the time, and some pundits are already gleefully microanalyzing the potential winners.

On National Public Radio, a reporter, Robert Smith, played a sound bite of Sting singing with The Police, "Every little thing she does is magic, everything she do just turns me on." Then Smith asked: "Do you really want a president that turns you on?"

Rob Sheffield, author of the book "Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time," said he wished that Clinton would choose a song she personally liked rather than deferring to the tastes of strangers.