Politicians, pundits and political pros around the world are already mining the Democratic nomination race for lessons they can take home with them. At a talk I gave recently to local councillors in Ireland the official topic was the 2009 local and European elections, but pols are desperate to know how they can bottle a little lightning from the ongoing American spectacle.

Here’s one thing they should be chewing over: in the internet-enabled political world of eternal return, you can be forced to relive moments forever in a way that even a few years ago voters could be relied upon to forget. And in the Long Tail of political ephemera, it’s not just candidates who can be the fodder for some gaffe that “virals”. It’s the surrogates, stupid.

Bill Clinton’s ill-judged interventions compressed his whole post-presidential public persona into a finger-wagging, race-baiting prig and hypocrite and quickly destroyed his wife’s claim that she had “found her voice” and was more than the ride-along who messed up her only official assignment, healthcare reform.

A hapless state senator from Texas, asked by MSNBC presenter Chris Matthews to name a singe achievement of Barack Obama’s 11-year legislative career sits blinking into the lights and gives the impression that Obama is as vacuuous as the Clintosn make him out to be.

John McCain will be doing a lot of apologising for surrogates over the coming months. McCain already been forced into apologies - having already had to apologise for the right-wing talk radio host Bill Cunningham’s “Hussein” warmup speech at a McCain rally (and Cunningham’s angry riposte at being thus spurned), the Tennessee Republican party’s hit and is in hot water for welcoming the endorsement of a virulently anti-Catholic evangelical preacher in Texas. And that’s Week One of his life as Republican standard-bearer.

We know that such errors happen all the time, and the post-Macaca YouTube-blog-twitter-enabled world means that eternal repeat of gaffes at the viewer’s - rather than just a TV producer’s - discretion will now be part of the rough and tumble. I wonder what effect it will have on campaigns over time - it really isn’t possible to be answerable for not just everything you say, but everything any of your supporters might say at any time. Is it?

But now that the race has come down to Texas, here’s another tip: if you’re basing your candidacy on “experience”, and your closing argument is a (poorly executed) late hit on fears about your opponent being “untested”, like Hillary Clinton’s “3AM” ad, your surrogates better be able to rattle off the foreign crises you’ve successfully managed.

Full marks to Slate’s John Dickerson, who on a media conference call with the Clinton campaign, zeroed in on THE question Clinton’s 3AM ad begs: “What foreign policy moment would you point to in Hillary’s career where she’s been tested by crisis?”

For several seconds on the call, there is nothing but static from any of her top campaign strategists.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. The mp3 of the clip is available at National Journal’s hotline blog here, via Politico’s Ben Smith. Even after spluttering through a couple of minutes of waffle, there still isn’t an answer. As somebody who’s had his share of deer in headlights moments on radio or TV, I have some sympathy. But then, I didn’t bill out $4.3m to one client last year while CEO of one of the biggest PR firms in the world. And the question remains unanswered because it is unanswerable. Hillary Clinton has less experience dealing with a foreign policy crisis than your average Marine guard at a US Embassy.

Selling her as something she wasn’t may have been possible 20 years ago. Now it isn’t. Part of the change is down to the fact that the technology means you will eventually get caught out.

UPDATE: The Obama response to the 3AM ad - not bad.