Let me throw out a counterfactual.

If we had had blogs when Bill Clinton was President, he would have been a lot less effective and his approval ratings lower.

Bloggers, who shape more and more of the coverage, deal largely in the printed word. Until YouTube, video was utterly irrelevant to our commentary. Even now, a well-informed blogger can go through an entire day without turning on the TV and watching the speech for him or herself.

On the whole, this will tend to devalue eloquence, smooth-talk, whatever you want to call it. It will reward the politician who is clear, direct, and succinct, whose words make sense in 12-point Times New Roman.

I think this is part of why Mitt Romney is having a hard time escaping the flip-flopper charge, something that also dogged Bill Clinton. Yes, he’s a Republican, so he doesn’t get media brownie points. There are also the YouTube-style ambushes you just wouldn’t have seen in 1992. (There was an amusing scene in The War Room in which Carville et al. were debating whether to use footage of Bush signs being made in Brazil that some volunteer taped off a college public access channel. That wouldn’t be up for discussion in 2008. Someone would have YouTubed it.)

But an overlooked point is that we now have an entire class of opinion leaders that look to the text-driven Internet, not television, to shape their coverage. To a large degree, these opinion leaders will be immune from the charms of a Clinton or a Romney. Political reporters themselves are probably less reliant on TV day-to-day, trolling the blogosphere for storylines. I often regarded the TV on all the time at campaign headquarters as background noise, secondary to my online information diet.

Politicians who are very good on TV will still have an advantage. Lots of voters still get their information this way. But it’s an advantage that will be blunted by the authentic, no-frills nature of the Web, where the most succinct messages get the highest clickthroughs and where it’s easier to hold high-flying pols accountable. That tendency will tend to inflect mainstream coverage over time.

Take the uproar over Clinton’s outburst on Fox News last year. In the pre-Internet era, it’s more likely that Clinton would have had the last word. Or that he would have been matched by equally overheated conservative TV pundits, rendering it a wash. Or, even worse, that the face of the Republican response would have been some untelegenic GOP Senators bemoaning the incivility of it all. All played out on television, where Clinton had an inherent advantage.

It’s precisely because we had a grassroots medium to ridicule Bill’s staged outrage that its impact was blunted. At the same time, we had a substantive debate on the Clinton record on terrorism, which we wouldn’t have had on cable news. This has an inherently leveling effect against planned media offensives by telegenic pols.

It’s also harder to smear bloggers in the same way you can attack TV and radio personalities. The First Law of New Media goes like this: “Never get into an argument with a blogger. You won’t win.” Think Progress regularly attacks O’Reilly, Rush, and other elements of the VRWC, but it’s laughable when they try and go after the “rightwing” Power Line guys. The Clintons perfected the “attack the messenger” strategy while in office. How well will it work with bloggers, who still have a heavy underdog streak? How would they have handled CBS memogate differently? Would they have attempted to smear Scott Johnson as a tool of rightwingthinktanks and Free Republic as inherently not credible? This might have worked in a media-scarce 1992 environment with the MSM to carry their water, but not as well with pesky bloggers demanding a substantive response.

Remember that it was Drudge that first bedeviled the Clinton media operation. Clinton II’s worst nightmare isn’t Drudge, but a thousand mini-Drudges you can’t fully track or demonize.

I should note that I don’t think this entire analysis applies to Hillary. It’s clear that she’s adopted the hard-edged, more partisan style of the netroots and doesn’t share her husband’s rhetorical gifts. So she will be comparatively more effective in the new partisan media environment than she would be in the dying TV marketplace.

But the point that blogs are Bill Clinton’s kryptonite still stands.