'O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!" Such is the sound of Hillary Clinton's nightmares, and it's the voice track to the latest "viral" pro-Barack video clip, authored by will.i.am - William J Adams Jr - of the hip-hop ensemble the Black Eyed Peas. It has so far been viewed over 750,000 times on YouTube.
Titled We Are the Ones in honour of Obama's campaign line "We are the ones we've been waiting for", it stars actor Ryan Phillippe, Macy Gray, Lenny Kravitz's daughter Zoe, and the Bangles' Susanna Hoffs. Among the choicer lines is "I want to live in a world without fear", which may lead to what politicians call an Expectations Problem, but let's not come over too cynical.
Adams' previous pro-Obama clip - which got nearly 6m hits - was directed by Bob Dylan's son Jesse and, like the sequel, was shot in the crisp monochrome of a Gap ad. "Yes we can" finds a similar array of supportive creative types reciting Obama's elegant oratory in sync with the man himself: they include the rapper and actor Common, jazz veteran Herbie Hancock and the ubiquitous Scarlett Johansson.
By way of competition, Clinton's celeb endorsers haven't come up with much - but then the ex-first lady is trying to characterise the battle for the Democratic nomination as a matter of empty sophistry versus earnest experience, which surely entails an avoidance of this kind of stuff. That said, there's at least one pro-Clinton celeb short knocking around, in which clips from Jack Nicholson movies are recontextualised to make pro-Hillary points, climaxing with a line from A Few Good Men: "There is nothing on this earth sexier than a woman you have to salute in the morning." It comes with Jack's official approval, but so far it's amassed a lowly 251,000 hits, which may jangle the Clinton camp's nerves about the coming primaries - or perhaps not.
There's not much John McCain-wise, but the endorsement of Mike Huckabee's failed bid by faded action star Chuck Norris left behind a viral plague: type their names into YouTube, and you get 313 videos, the greatest of which is "HuckChuckFacts" (1m hits). Huckabee, we learn, is "a lifelong hunter". At one point, "Huck" looks to camera and says, "There's no chin behind Chuck Norris's beard, just another fist." Pardon?
Anyway, viewed soon after Scarlett, Ryan, Common et al, it rather brings to mind another Obama soundbite: "We are one people; we are one nation." Who's he kidding?
