The GIF-laden release achieved its ostensible purpose: It drew attention. Lots of it. Because this was a new thing, sort of, this whimsical fusion of Disney princess and public policy! Whether it was clever or “asinine,” the release was an innovative approach to political messaging.

Except, of course, it wasn’t that innovative. Earlier this year, House Speaker John Boehner’s staff used GIFs—12 of them, starring, exclusively, Taylor Swift—to poke fun at the White House’s free community college initiative. Two years ago, the House Energy and Commerce committee used moving images of various pop-cultural figures to argue in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline. ("What do Jimmy Fallon, Honey Boo Boo, Napoleon Dynamite’s brother Kip, Ron Burgundy, Dwight Schrute, and GloZell all have in common? Together, they capture the highs and lows of the turbulent journey of the Keystone XL pipeline over the past five years.") The White House itself turned to GIFs last year in its effort to convince people—young people in particular—to sign up for insurance on healthcare.gov. GIFs cited in that effort included a twerking woman and a lazy cat.

You could point out, certainly, that GIFs—with their endless, loopy repetitions, hinting at what might have happened had Sisyphus lived on into the digital age—suggest something profound, and profoundly cynical, about the various inertias of American politics. Beyond that, though, GIFs are not, their seeming novelty aside, meaningfully different from any other type of trendy digital media: They’re aimed at young people. They’re usually created by young people. They allow politicians to create that rarest of things within the heavily choreographed pageantries of American politics: the illusion of whimsy.

Last week's Judiciary Committee’s GIF-fest was simply an extension of the time the House Natural Resources Committee explained why people shouldn’t skip out on budget hearings in listicle form. It’s an extension of the Obama for America Tumblr. It's an extension of the White House's many experiments with Facebook and Tumblr and reddit and Instagram and YouTube and "Between Two Ferns." As a Judiciary Committee aide told the tech site Re/code in response to the criticism its press release drew, “GIF op-eds are being used more and more, including here in the halls of Congress.” The aide added that the committee is constantly trying to find new ways to “communicate our message to an increasing number of people.”

So are all political actors. And the way to do that, many of them are finding, is to minimize the divide between political media and media of other kinds. The relationship between politics and PR has long been a fluid one; digital media, for their part, are removing even more barriers between "politics" and "everything else." Barack Obama is an author on Buzzfeed. GIFs (and listicles and quizzes and the like) are equal-opportunity communications tools. The presidential campaign of 2012 was dubbed "the meme election." Internet jokery, however, is reshaping our political discourse far beyond the confines of traditional elections. You could say, less felicitously, that we're entering the era of "the permanent meme campaign." And that campaign will involve, inevitably, the tools of Internet virality—among them, yep, some jerky images of Disney princesses, blinking, nihilistically, into the ether.

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