Something new is happening in American politics. It all began when a Republican senator, George Allan called a man of Indian American descent a macaca monkey. The comment was made in a rally speech during Allan’s 2006 senate bid and the recipient caught the comments on his video recorder. Once upon a time such a racial slur might have been deniable and therefore only mildly damaging. However, when a video of the incident was posted on a new filesharing site called YouTube, everything changed. The video went viral and Allan’s campaign spiralled downward.

Allan, as the incumbent and the candidate clearly leading in the polls, was expected to win easily. However "macaca-gate" not only lost him his seat but also dashed his hopes of becoming his party’s next presidential nominee. Events culminated as Democrat Jim Webb, by winning the seat from Allan, also tipped the balance of power in the senate and swung control to the Democrats.

Suddenly America’s multi-million pound campaign industry was threatened by an interminable source of opposition. Developments in social software have meant that uploaders of content no longer need to be fluent in computer languages such as html. This in turn has meant PC whizz-kids and their employers have lost their monopoly over content production on the internet. With this has come the creation of sites such as YouTube who rely on user-generated content for their very existence.

What the macaca incident did was to show the impact these developments could have on politics. The ease with which a so called "ordinary Joe" could dramatically affect the political scene both excited those who saw American politics as elitist and unnerved politicians and their campaign strategists.

So it was with baited breath that political pundits awaited the 2008 election; the first American general election since the creation of sites like Facebook and YouTube. They waited to see what 'macaca moments' - as they have now been dubbed - lay in store and they will most definitely not have been disappointed.

First, there was the anonymous YouTube video posted back in March 2007, which depicted Hillary Clinton as an Orwellian Big Brother. The "Vote Different" video was a mash-up of Ridley Scott’s famous Apple Mac ad from 1984 and was soon being emailed around the world. The ad transposed Hillary Clinton’s face on the large screen that is brainwashing all the zombiefied workers who sit beneath it. The beauty of the ad was its simplicity. The snippets from Hillary Clinton’s own speeches, where she refers to "our conversation," were hugely ironic in the context and enough to successfully draw a parallel between Clinton and Orwell’s nightmare conception of an all-controlling dictator.

The anonymous ParkRidge47, who posted the ad, was eventually exposed by the weblog Huffingtonpost.com as Phil de Vellis. De Vellis had in fact already worked on the Obama campaign as part of his job at internet consulting firm Blue State Digital. His decision to create the video, however, had been made without their knowledge. In fact, he had created the video at home one Sunday afternoon using his MacBook laptop and Final Cut software. He has since become the poster boy for grass roots internet political activism. The clip has so far received over six million views, spawned many articles and proved how impossible it has become for campaigns to control the message.

The next month followed with a camera phone clip of John McCain singing "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" taken at a campaign stop in South Carolina. This version of the opening lines of the famous Beach Boys song 'Barbara Ann' seemed to go down much better with the laughing crowd than it has in publicity resulting from the YouTube posting.

Even if candidates are careful of what they do, that is no guarantee of avoiding a 'macaca moment', as candidates' pasts have also come back to haunt them. The political storm created by the videos of Obama’s outspoken Pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, only began to abate when a different YouTube scandal engulfed Hillary Clinton later that month.

For months Clinton had denied accusations that she had lied about a trip to Bosnia as first lady. However when footage appeared on YouTube of Clinton’s arriving in Bosnia to a greeting ceremony, she was forced to admit that she "misspoke" when she described being forced to run from the aircraft under sniper fire.

YouTube has also been used for more light hearted political fun. For a start, the 'Obama Girl' and her catchy tune ‘I’ve got a Crush on Obama’ has had people singing "you can barack me tonight" all over America. Similarly, Black Eyed Peas rapper Will.I.Am’s celebrity studded ‘Yes We Can’ video, which is a musical support ad for Obama, is the most popular video on the internet in the last year.

Other celebrity YouTube highlights include Matt Damon’s anti-Sarah Palin rant in which he emphatically states “I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago… because… she is going to have the nuclear codes.” In addition, cast of the hit television show Gossip Girl have recently combined with the civic action group moveon.org to make a YouTube appeal. The appeal asks young people to talk to their parents about the evils of voting McCain.

The YouTube video in full

The various campaigns have tried to get in on the YouTube act by producing their own videos but with little significant success. Hillary Clinton’s cringe making Sopranos spoof did manage around 500,000 views, but nowhere close to the numbers that other grassroots viral political ads have received.

Instead, political campaigns have attempted to harness some of the buzz from unofficial support videos. The announcement of the Obama campaign that they will be releasing an album entitled Yes We Can: Voices of a Grassroots Movement demonstrates two interesting things. Firstly, it shows how aware political campaigns are becoming of online grass roots power. Secondly, the eight months between the posting of the video and the announcement by Obama’s campaign of the fundraising initiative shows that the political elite are still playing catch up with the new web developments.

Of course YouTube is not the only maverick internet force to shake up American politics. The influence of blogs can be immense. When Sarah Palin was announced as the Republican vice-presidential candidate it was a very unexpected person that she called to thank. Adam Brickley, a 21-year-old student and internet blogger was thanked by Palin for the "tenacity" of his support. Brickley set up his website, palinforvp.blogspot.com, from his bedroom back in April 2007. By June it was receiving 5,000 hits a day and websites such as Slate.com have attributed considerable significance to the role it played in Palin’s selection.

In fact students and other young people are likely to be more au fait with the internet and are thus particularly well positioned to take advantage of the new possibilities for armchair activism. Under work done by the Pew Research Centre students are demographically far more likely to be "content creators" than many other groups in American society. It is therefore no coincidence that the majority of positive uses of new media by grass roots have been directed at Obama. This correlates with the fact that Obama has considerably more support from young people than McCain.

With polling day just around the corner it is still hard to tell whether these events have had a decisive role. What they most definitely have done is shaken up traditional politics and made campaign strategists sit up and take note. They also indicate that young people and celebrities may be proving particularly resourceful at utilising this new medium. Overall they have helped to challenge the idea, that in America, money wins elections. How has this been done? By levelling, if just a little, the political playing field.