It’s the message and the medium.

As Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama spar over issues like leadership, the economy, and war, there’s another, less obvious ideological battle taking place. It doesn’t carry the weight of the usual big issues, but it’s arguably more interesting.

Simply put: Obama vs. Clinton represents the first large-scale test of whether or not modern thinking on communications and creativity is really as effective as many of us believe.

Just so we’re clear: debating what the two candidates are actually saying is for another place. What’s more interesting here is the differences in the way they say it.

On one side we have Obama campaigning on themes of hope and change, and his virtual identity reflects those themes. The my.barackobama.com site is a kind of Obama-specific Facebook, which as far as I can tell is a Presidential campaign first. Beyond that, the overall design of his communications is modern and culturally savvy. He’s tapping into tools and strategies that haven’t yet been tested on a political stage this large.

Clinton, by contrast, is campaigning on experience and knowledge. She presents herself as the hard-bitten veteran who spent time in the trenches learning how to play the game. Her website reflects that with its strong, stable, and conventional presentation. While she does participate in sites like MySpace and Facebook, she hasn’t taken any steps akin to building her own social network. She embraces only that which is both proven and tested, and not a nugget more.

Predictably enough, Obama’s modern approach has already won some respect in the creative community. His website has received some favorable notice, and the Shepard Fairey poster above took the creative wing of the Internet by storm. Clinton has won no such accolades or notice that I can find.

At the risk of drawing a too-obvious parallel, Hillary Clinton is Microsoft to Barack Obama’s Apple. And as it stands right now, they are virtually deadlocked.

Creative folks tend to believe in the power of innovation. We point to things like the iPhone and Nintendo Wii as examples, and we’re right to do so. But as successful as those (and many other) new ideas have been, how sure can we be of how they play out in the proving ground that is the whole America?

We already know that innovation and great design work wonders in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. What we don’t know is how well those concepts work in rural Kansas, or in the suburbs of Texas or Pennsylvania or Ohio.

The central question we’re faced with is: do innovation and great design really move people, or just certain people?

The Obama-Clinton battle won’t settle the issue, but if we’re paying close enough attention it will teach us valuable lessons for the years to come.