America's biggest political weapon is YouTube. Has it already lost its sting?

YouTube has changed the way we do a lot of things, and politics is certainly one of them.

The video-sharing site, launched in 2005 and turbo-charged when Google purchased it a year later, gave us the first taste of its potency as a political weapon in the 2006 midterms. Then-Virginia Sen. George Allen (R) saw his heavily favored re-election campaign fall apart when he was caught on video calling an Indian-American staffer for opponent Jim Webb "macaca."

"Politicians, beware. The video revolution is not being televised but it is online," warned Richard Koman at ZDNet on Aug. 22, 2006, less than two weeks after Allen made his extemporaneous "macaca" quip. "I think YouTube is revolutionizing political communication," Democratic consultant Bill Buck told NPR two months later.

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From "macaca" on, campaigns have employed camera-toting "trackers" to follow their opponents around, hoping for a similar gotcha moment. None has had quite the same success as Webb, but YouTube has upended political campaigns in a number of other ways, too. All of a sudden, shoe-string campaigns could reach broad audiences for just the price of filming a memorable ad and maybe hiring a social media staffer. Politicians could get their message across unfiltered — and for free.

YouTube did probably more than anything else to jump-start Barack Obama's first presidential campaign — a video of his "our moment is now" speech in Iowa in November 2007, nine months after he launched his quixotic campaign, made him a viable candidate, soon to be frontrunner. YouTube almost killed his presidential aspirations, too, when video of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's "God Dam America" sermon exploded online.

You can probably effortlessly name the big YouTube moments from the 2012 elections — Mitt Romney's "47 percent" debacle, Rick Perry's campaign-ending "Oooops" memory lapse, and maybe even the Innocence of the Muslims video clip, to name but a few.

YouTube was once again a major tool in the 2014 midterms. But I'm hard-pressed to think of any campaign it really helped or harmed. Candidates said some regrettable things on the campaign trail, but with the exception of Kentucky Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes refusing to say if she voted for Obama, nothing broke through.

That was partly by design — Republican officials and campaign committees helped select broadly appealing candidates and coached them in how to avoid saying dumb stuff in public, like unintentional 2012 YouTube stars Todd "Legitimate Rape" Aiken and Richard Mourdock. And politicians of both parties seem to have adapted to the YouTube age by trying their hardest to refrain from saying anything interesting or off-script.

But it may also be that voters are becoming inured to the sharable-video "gotcha" cudgel. Political weapons lose their effectiveness with time and new technologies, and as politicians adapt. It could also be that the American electorate is so jaded and cynical — or perhaps over-outraged — at this point that the bar for a YouTube hit job is enormously high. Or maybe voters are more discerning YouTube consumers now, B.S. detectors honed from years of watching things like conservative activist James O'Keefe's misleading edits — once politically lethal, O'Keefe's videos are now met mostly with rolled-eyes, if anyone notices at all.

There's also the distinct possibility that Google's video juggernaut hasn't lost its political sting, and that 2014 was an anomaly, with a disgusted, disengaged electorate tuning everything out, even YouTube. We'll find out in the 2015 primaries and 2016 presidential race.