Back in May, we marveled at Barack Obama's internet database, a collection of supporter's home addresses, phone numbers, and political views that Catalist Chief Executive Laura Quinn said was as "transformational'' as the advent of political advertising.

How cherished is this data? According to the Washington Post,  the list of 10 million supporters -- 3.1 million of whom donated money to the campaign -- "is considered so valuable that the Obama camp briefly offered it as collateral during a cash-flow crunch late in the campaign," though that turned out to be unnecssary. "We are talking about a fundraising network," consultant Tad Devine guessed in May, "that will far surpass the dominance that the Republicans held in the '80s and even in to the '90s.''

Obama's historic campaign -- in which he successfully raised an ungodly amount of cash, a large proportion of it from small dollar donors -- proved Devine's assumption right. Even more exciting, the president-elect will try to harness the power of his web infrastructure to help him govern. The Post has more details:

Accordingly, the president-elect's http://www.change.gov transition Web site features a blog and a suggestion form, signaling the kinds of direct and instantaneous interaction that the Obama administration will encourage, perhaps with an eye toward turning its following into the biggest special-interest group in Washington.

Once Obama is sworn in, those backers may be summoned to push reluctant members of Congress to support legislation, to offer feedback on initiatives and to enlist in administration-supported causes in local communities. Obama would also be positioned to ask his supporters to back his favored candidates with fundraising and turnout support in the 2010 midterm elections.

An anecdote from Newsweek's in-depth series on the presidential campaign is illustrative of the power hidden in Obama's Internet network.

At the end of August, as Hurricane Gustav threatened the coast of Texas, the Obama campaign called the Red Cross to say it would be routing donations to it via the Red Cross home page. Get your servers ready—our guys can be pretty nuts, Team Obama said. Sure, sure, whatever, the Red Cross responded. We've been through 9/11, Katrina, we can handle it. The surge of Obama dollars crashed the Red Cross Web site in less than 15 minutes.

What FDR was to the radio, Obama could be to the Internet. I'm personally excited for some Mac-side chats.