NEW YORK - Given all that's at stake in the 2008 presidential race, it's a bit terrifying to realize that by one measure, a major role is being played by an aspiring model/actress/fashion designer/former beauty pageant contestant named Amber.

That's Amber Lee Ettinger, aka Obama Girl, whose racy web video "I Got A Crush On Obama'' has received well over two million hits in the three weeks it's been online, making it one of the most-watched political videos this season.

Some of us are so used to our daily fix of web videos, it's hard to remember that back in 2004, when President George W. Bush spoke of "the Internets,'' there was no YouTube.

Three years later, people are calling this the "YouTube Election,'' in which anyone with a minicam or even a mere cellphone can conceivably affect the outcome.

"Some of the best, the most innovative stuff is gonna come from some voter out there, who changes the entire complexion of the race,'' says Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Howard Dean in 2004, now adviser to the John Edwards campaign.

And that's a scary thing for campaigns, which are used to controlling their own message, enforcing it from the top down. On the new playing field, "you lose the ability to manage what you want to say,'' says Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, a former White House staffer during Bill Clinton's presidency.

So what's a campaign manager to do? Fight back, with all the technology available, including MySpace and Facebook profiles, candidates' own online communities and text-messaging networks. On Senator Barack Obama's site, you can download ringtones with snippets of his speeches set to a rock or hip-hop motif.

But web video is the big battlefield. Hillary Rodham Clinton used it to try to warm up her image, urging "Let's chat,'' as she opened her campaign online. She's made fun of her questionable singing skills, since others were doing so anyway. And in her "Sopranos'' spoof, her campaign sought to catch the wave of a pop-culture phenomenon, mimicking that famous diner ending (some would say non-ending) and even scoring a cameo from the character Johnny Sack.

No matter that the video had nothing to do with any issues. Half a million people viewed it on the Clinton site the first day, another half million the next day, and so many on YouTube and other sites that the campaign estimates several million have now watched it. Not to mention the inevitable spoofs that this spoof has spawned.

"The word `viral' is overused, but here it's apt,'' says Peter Daou, Internet director for the Clinton campaign. "We're trying to use online video in all different ways. This is new for all of us.'' The "Sopranos'' video was aimed at showing Clinton has a sense of humour.

But she probably didn't find it so humourous when the Orwellian "Hillary 1984'' video came out earlier this year, a mashup of a classic Apple ad, depicting Clinton as a Big Brother-type figure. The ad, produced by a renegade employee of a company hired to design Obama's website, has now been seen by a whopping four million or so on YouTube.

Amateur or low-tech video can be just as popular. Some recently posted old footage shows Edwards primping for two minutes, set to the song "I Feel Pretty'' from "West Side Story.'' Combined with stories about his expensive haircuts, it likely plays into characterizations of Edwards as the "Breck'' candidate.

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani was just being a good sport at the annual Inner Circle dinner in 2000 when he appeared in drag in a taped skit and let Donald Trump kiss his heavily padded bosom. Now that Giuliani's running for the Republican nomination, YouTube users are circulating it with glee.

Meanwhile, Obama, whose fundraising success has wowed observers, is getting more Internet buzz than any of his rivals. Nielsen added up mentions in web logs and discussion groups and found Obama had nearly 46 per cent of Democratic chatter compared to Clinton's 32 per cent. (Overall, Democrats were ahead of Republicans.) And it seems the Obama-produced videos have been hooking viewers: visitors to his site stay an average of six minutes, 21 seconds.

Web surfers in a more romantic mood might be interested in a recap of how Republican candidate Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, got together. They can just turn to "Mitt TV,'' his own video trove on his website. Under the "Fun'' channel, the former Massachusetts governor and his wife tell Fox host Greta Van Susteren how they met as children. For the record, he was a Cub scout and she was riding a horse.