THIS was not what Hillary Clinton had in mind when her presidential team set up its stall on YouTube to promote the New York senator’s leadership qualities. As of last week, more than 130,000 visitors had viewed an amateur video entitled Hillary Clinton Farts!.

All the leading candidates in the 2008 presidential race have embraced the internet’s busiest social networking sites in the hope of reaching out to a younger, trendier audience than is usually to be found at their public meetings. In one respect the strategy has paid off handsomely, with millions of dollars rolling in from online contributions.

Yet there has also been an anarchic backlash to the spread of serious politics on the web. The candidates have all been subject to satirical, mocking and sometimes vicious assaults by net-savvy tricksters whose fabricated videos and photomontages have in many cases proved more popular than the earnest output of the official campaigns.

More than 240,000 viewers have seen a YouTube video entitled Hillary Clinton Nude. Another hugely popular video, a 13-second spoof of the most famous scene in the Hitchcock thriller Psycho, is called Hillary Clinton in the Shower and contains one of the funniest surprises of the campaign.

A race like a crackpot Dynasty

The contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton matches any fiction

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In Hillary’s Cleavage or Sharon Stone Flash there is a bizarre take on the actress’s crossing of legs under police questioning in Basic Instinct, with the slogan, “Hillary . . . Better equipped than Thatcher in a world of evil men”.

To Clinton’s credit, she joined in the spirit of web tomfoolery with a video spoof last year showing her and her husband Bill Clinton, the former president, acting out a scene from The Sopranos, the television mafia drama. Since then the web has been a lot less funny for the Clintons, as their every hiccup and stumble has been recorded by amateur video sleuths, some suspected of being in the pay of rival candidates.

Hundreds of thousands of people have viewed shots of Bill Clinton falling asleep during ceremonies honouring Martin Luther King; other embarrassing moments are recorded in videos with titles such as Hillary Cackles; Hillary Shows off Her Tits; Hillary Double-talk and The Shocking Video Hillary Does Not Want You to See.

Barack Obama, Clinton’s main rival, has got off comparatively lightly, perhaps because most Americans tend to shrink from mocking black personalities. He may even have benefited from a series of videos depicting “ObamaGirl”, a beautiful dancer portrayed as his guardian angel.

The battle has extended to Facebook, where in addition to the official Clinton pages can be found an antiClinton group with 20,000 members and the provocatively sexist title of Hillary Clinton: Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich.

While there is little doubt that virtual campaigning is here to stay, web experts warn that candidates have only themselves to blame if their online efforts are viewed as pandering or exploitative. When the Clinton campaign recently posted a badly made video – in which pictures and audio were out of sync and no response was made to online complaints – a pair of YouTube watchdogs posted a response entitled Is Hillary Clinton Abusing YouTube?

John Kramer and Aaron Sjoholm recounted their failed efforts to attract the campaign’s online attention and concluded: “Are they just using YouTube as free ad space and is that cool?” Their video has been viewed more than 270,000 times.

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