Last weekend, tourists in Las Vegas were greeted by the sight of Ron Paul supporters parading down the Strip, chanting:

We’re not just the Internet.  We’re flesh and blood.

Could this serve as the motto of the 2008 campaign?  The election when online social networks proved that they exist, by out-fundraising traditional party elites, by helping create surging turnout by consituencies long dismissed by party insiders, and by spawning effective grassroots organizing across the country on an unprecendented scale.

A mere week after launching Students for Hillary and touting its support among young people, top advisers to Hillary Clinton were busy in the spin room Saturday night disparaging them, claiming that Obama's supporters were young and unlikely to caucus.

The message: Our supporters "look like caucus-goers," their supporters "look like Facebook."

Earlier this week in Washington, Facebook hosted two consecutive workshops that it dubbed the Facebook Political Summit.  "Our goal is to make you win," announced Josh Rahn, director of sales, before laying out the numbers, as reported by J.P. Freire of the NY Times, "[O]f 45 million active users, 80 percent are of voting age. These users spend an average of 22 minutes on the site a day, more than enough time to hear the campaign's pitch."  And Facebook is changing.  College students who used to be Facebook's exclusive audience now "account for a third to half of its membership."