How does John McCain go up against the $3 million-per-email Obama machine and the $2 million-per-email Clinton machine? It's a big question with serious implications for the future of the Republican Party. And the answer is not incrementalism.

First, let's look at the fundamentals.

How did Clinton and Obama get 20 to 30 percent of their voters to sign up for their lists? At a fundamental level, it's because they did the big things online. They created a sense that the Web was The Place for anyone to come and show their support. They channeled their offline activity into email addresses and online donations. They did videos that were at once viral and strategic, and not just the expected bio pieces.

These newsworthy events early in the campaign forced hundreds of thousands of people to go to BarackObama.com or HillaryClinton.com to see what was up. While they were there, tens of thousands signed up for the list. And thousands gave donations, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in single days in the sleepy 2007 months.

Yes, one can argue there was more organic interest, more Google searches, more media interest in Clinton and Obama. But the big events were force multipliers. When Romney, Thompson and Paul staged big online events during the primaries, their supporters responded in record numbers.

All of this launched a snowball effect. With the Clinton and Obama lists in the millions, it's just a numbers game. They could send out crap emails and people would respond. And McCain could send out great emails and people wouldn't respond because his list isn't organically as huge.

The traditional political answer to drive people to your website is to go out and find people. To advertise to them.

That's too expensive to do in any scalable fashion, particularly when the metric is signups and money. Online, it's much easier to let people come to you by making them organically interested.

To wit: John McCain should do a daily video blog from everyday now until the election. And don't make it "behind the scenes" fluff. More often than not, make it dead serious. Have him break news and introduce new messages and lines of attack. When he challenges Obama to debate, don't do it in a speech, do it on the vlog.

In short, do what Fred Thompson promised but never eventually delivered on. Let people see the real straight-talkin' McCain, and do it in a serialized fashion so that people come to expect it (there's a reason why Buzz Out Loud #680 and TWiT #135 get big audiences).

This is also a strategic move on McCain's part. If the footage next eight months against Obama is set-piece rally speeches, we lose. If the setting is more intimate and conversational, Obama is less of a threat, as we have seen from his uninspiring performance in debates.

In 2004, the Bush press shop would send around the paragraph or two in every stump speech that was different. Since most stump speeches were pretty much carbon copies of the last one, these inserts were news likely be the lede on an AP writethru within the hour.

In 2008, there is no reason not to launch many if not most of these messages on YouTube, or if one wants to follow the evil Peter Daou strategy, on an unembeddable JohnMcCain.com player with a huge signup box next to it.

In fact, campaigns that go the traditional route are missing out. By doing things mostly offline, they are missing an opportunity to drive people to the website to sign up and eventually donate. Do it on TV, and it's an ephemeral one day story. Do it on the Web and, true, the message won't stick around any longer, but the e-mail addresses you net that day will.

Plus, it's not an either-or strategy. You give B-roll to the nets and force them to credit the URL. This drives even more traffic, while getting your message out in the same medium that would have seen your offline message anyway.

This "Big Moments" strategy calls for John McCain to break his campaign's most provocative news online. And start doing this now, so it can have a chance to snowball before the convention.

They'll say this is too time consuming. No, it's not. It's two minutes of the candidate's time everyday, speaking from the gut, with minimal editing. The staff time would invariably be less than what it would take to craft two minutes of a candidate's speech that no more than a few thousand people would see live anyway. The less scripting and post-production the better.

They'll say this is somehow unpresidential. No, it's not. For one thing, John McCain is not the President. He is a candidate who is trying to be President. And McCain excels in natural, more intimate settings. Shooting the breeze on the back of the bus is also "unpresidential" but McCain does it anyway.

They'll say it screws the media out of exclusives. Yes, it does. But with the web, campaigns have a viable distribution channel of their own, and as a Presidential nominee, the media is to some extent forced to repeat it. A medium like this actually gives the campaign a greater opportunity to shape the message. And is it in a Republican campaign or White House's strategic interest to enable the New York Times's continued relevance by giving them exclusives that give them a leg up over competitors? A campaign can break its own news through the medium it chooses.

At the end of the day, the goal is simple: to create a content magnet that sucks in any reasonably interested McCain voter, gets them on the email list in short order, and gets them organizing (and self-organizing) right away.