I agree 100% with Trippi's assessment of the GOP candidates and competition on the net. (Notice how candid he is about his guy Edwards being behind Obama, so this is not just spin.) There is no underestimating the world of pain we will be in if we don't get the small donor and email list size thing right, and get it right by February 5th so that our nominee can go toe to toe with Hillary (1 million email addresses), Obama (258K donors), or Edwards (Joe Trippi's guy).

What are the GOP campaigns doing about this? Do they even view this as a problem, or are they too bogged down in winning short term tactical victories with high dollar donors and padding cash-on-hand figures? Do they care more about the next quarter, or building a sustainable 50-state, 3,141 county, $400 million-plus movement to take on Hillary or whomever is strong enough to beat her in the primary? Where is the synergy between short-term tactics and long-term strategy?

It's 2007, and the bottom is falling out on direct mail. (And none of the GOP candidates come to the table with a huge housefile anyway, so there shouldn't be a sense of cannibalizing your direct marketing infrastructure.) There's no better time to start prioritizing online over older, increasingly less effective forms of political contact. And yet the response to stuff like this seems to be... crickets.

This isn't a fringe Internets thing. We could lose because we don't correct this, in the same way that we almost lost in 2000 because we forgot door-to-door.

(H/T: TechRepublican.)