There’s lots of talk today about Obama nabbing Patti Solis Doyle, the former Clinton campaign manager who may or may not have a grudge against the Clinton campaign for pushing her out, and who definitely has strong ties to the Hispanic community.

Solis Doyle’s new job in the Obama campaign? Chief of staff to Obama’s VP pick, whoever he or she ends up being. (Which, to my mind, makes it a lot less likely that the VP pick will end up being Clinton.)

This is all part of a larger staffing up that Obama is doing as he heads into the general, but it reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to post for a while now.

I have a theory that Obama’s smartest staff pick ever is to be found in this Atlantic article from earlier this year. It’s about how Obama’s web savvy, as much as (or more than) anything else, made his campaign the money-making juggernaut that it is today. Deep within the article is this revealing paragraph:

Staffers credit the candidate himself with recognizing the importance of [online social networking] and claim that his years as a community organizer in Chicago allowed him to see its usefulness. Another view is that he benefited greatly from encouraging a culture of innovation and lucked out in the personnel department, with his own pair of 20-something wizards. Joe Rospars, a veteran of Dean’s campaign who had gone on to found an Internet fund-raising company, signed on as Obama’s new-media director. And Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, took a sabbatical from the company and came to Chicago to work on the campaign full-time.

Having Patti Solis Doyle on your staff is great and all, but my guess is that this cycle it doesn’t mean a whole lot if you don’t also have a Chris Hughes working on the back end of your web presence.

Meanwhile, McCain’s big tech-related moments have been his comments on his computer illiteracy (Mac or PC? “Niether, I am a illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance that I can get”) and his statement explaining how his campaign is using “a Google” to vet his potential VP picks. (Not to be confused with “the Google,” which is what our current president uses.)