If you are running for office, or work for a campaign, or just want to understand how the internets might be useful in politics...read you some Exley.

A tasty excerpt -- but you need to read it all:

[Obama] is making major campaign decisions without regard to potentials for base building on the Internet—most important among them: how to launch the campaign. I know that they would say, “We ARE taking it seriously!” I’ve heard this from campaigns a thousand times. And they think they mean it. But the “Internet strategy” is still something separate, and still not something for which the inner-circle takes full personal responsibility. They need to think about the Internet with the same intensity, curiosity and rigor that they apply to television, polling, speech writing/making and debate performance. This is the cycle when it is just complete idiocy to treat base-building through the Internet with one iota less seriousness than those other critical areas.

One reason it’s so hard for traditional campaign people to understand the Internet is that, for campaigns, it is primarily a grassroots organizing medium.

Zack has a bold, specific proposal, but the underlying truth has been clear for a while -- if only up to a certain point on the campaign org chart. I wrote this in 2003:

Zephyr Teachout sits at her computer in a dimly lit nook of the Dean for America headquarters in South Burlington, VT, and dreams of the real world. "I'm obsessed with offline,'' says the director of Internet organizing for the Howard Dean presidential campaign...for Teachout, a 31-year-old lawyer in black high-top sneakers, the campaign is not about the Internet. Online tools are a way to get people to act -- to meet in the physical world, to put up flyers and posters, write letters and checks, speak to other people face to face. And ultimately, to get out and vote. "The Internet is moving from information technology to organizing technology," she says.

Exley's key point is that it's time for the candidates themselves to get with the not-so-new reality.