Zack Exley has a very good, though premature, post about the importance of Web organizing for the Obama campaign.

Following comparisons to Nixon’s famous inability to understand the new medium of television in 1960, he writes…

Today, of course, all candidates and campaign managers know they must understand television, and media consultants sit within the inner-most circle informing and overseeing every single decision—even down to what shirt to wear for debate night.

For the Internet in politics, it’s 1960 again. And I can’t tell you how painful it is, as someone who knows the power of this medium, to watch a candidate with as much potential as Obama just blowing it—just like Nixon did with TV in his first run.

Obama and his senior aides aren’t doing the deep thinking they need to do on their own about this medium. They, like most of their competitors, have delegated “the Internet thing” to staffers who are far outside of the inner circle (”senior staff” is not the inner circle), and have refused to take personal responsibility for understanding the potentials of the medium on their own. In Obama’s case, it’s inexcusable because the Internet is just dying to make him president.

The result is that he 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.

Again, this is premature, but I hope the Obama campaign, and Obama himself, recognize the wisdom of a lot of Exley’s recommendations that follow this passage. Read the whole thing.