Love local politics? You won’t want to miss Will Higgins’ story in this morning’s Indianapolis Star about the fading power of precinct committeefolk in Marion County.

The once-coveted positions, drained of their influence in this post-patronage era, today go begging in Marion County and across the country. Even as a historic presidential election looms, local Republican and Democratic parties each have about 50 precinct openings. They have had vacancies for more than a decade, but the waning interest is especially startling because in January the number of precincts in the county was reduced from 914 to 590.

The job used to mean constant door-to-door canvassing, voter-registering and sometimes front-porch debating.

These days, not so much. For a variety of reasons — personal safety, increasing reliance on political advertising, expanded voter registration methods — it’s no longer common for precinct committeemen to walk their neighborhoods.

I’d argue that there are still a small handful of powerful PCs in the county, but Higgins is right: They’re a dying breed.

Personally, I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. It just means the parties have to be smarter about recruiting talented, involved people who can carry the message back to their neighborhoods. It’s not enough to rely on yard signs, slate cards and the string-laced field maps of yesteryear. There are new technologies and strategies out there that can make party organization a lot easier; we just have to embrace them instead of clinging to the way we’ve always done things.

Though I’ve got Barack Obama’s groundbreaking, impeccably executed campaign in mind, the lessons learned apply to folks on both sides of the aisle.