It will take time to fully understand the dynamics of Barack Obama's victory in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Political historians will parse out the unexpected victory by the Hawai'i-born Obama for years to come.

But even at this point, there are elements to his victory that should become object lessons to anyone seeking political office in the future.

It's true that, to some degree, Obama's success is an accident of history.

Obama's candidacy came along just as the Democratic Party was apparently ready to break old boundaries and shatter gender and race stereotypes in a dramatic way: The two leading candidates at the end were a woman and a man of African-American ancestry.

Obama was also lucky. He vaulted onto the national stage with his election to the U.S. Senate in part because his equally viable opponents unexpectedly self-destructed for personal reasons.

And then as a candidate Obama got lucky again when Michigan and Florida decided to buck party rules and hold their presidential primaries earlier than scheduled. Had they waited in line, there is a very good chance that those two states might have provided Hillary Clinton the boost she needed to knock Obama out of the race.

An accident of history.

But as the old saying goes, the best way to take advantage of luck is to be well-prepared. And on this front, Obama surely was. He organized a new kind of national campaign, one unlike any seen before.

The key to Obama's organizational success was his use of the viral power of the Internet combined with classic grassroots political organizing skills that had largely gone out of favor in national politics. Many pointed to Howard Dean's use of the Internet four years ago as a breakthrough use of the medium to raise money and gain attention.

But Obama and his team took it a giant step forward. Obama launched his own Internet social network (think Facebook and YouTube) to create a "place" where like-minded people could communicate, organize, plan and attend events and, yes, give money to the campaign. These communities were every bit as politically powerful as familiar political communities (neighborhoods, labor groups, ethnic communities) of the past.

And what's truly new is how these virtual communities take on a power that is often far greater than the original sum of their parts. One explanation for this unexpected power can be found in a new book by Harvard doctoral student David Singh Grewal, "Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization."

Grewal is not writing about politics directly. Rather, he attempts to understand how social relations — or what he calls network power — gain and hold influence. The idea is that as social networks gain in viability and usefulness, they tend to grow and at some point undermine or erode alternative forms of cooperation.

That's true even if the alternative is equally good or even if joining the dominant network does not serve the joiner's best interests.

Once a network reaches critical mass, Grewal says, the incentive to join it rather than the alternative becomes all but irresistible. It takes on a life of its own.

Think Microsoft, the Gold Standard or even the dominance of the English language for trade and commerce.

In that way, you could say Obama's politically organized social organization gained power and numbers and eroded our traditional view of political networks from within.

Clinton had her unions and big city political bosses and institutional support and cadres of traditional Democratic fundraisers. But at some point, that began not to matter.

The lesson here is obvious for political candidates: The Internet makes new forms of social networks possible, and more than that, it can make them powerful. Grassroots organizing will always be useful, but precisely what is organized and how it comes into being may have been changed forever.

Jerry Burris' column appears Wednesdays in this space. See his blog at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com/akamaipolitics. Reach him at jrryburris@yahoo.com.