Was that fun? By any measure, the 2008 elections were historic. On a national level, it produced a viable African-American and a female candidate on the Democratic side, and a female vice presidential candidate for the first time on the Republican side.

Locally, voters were presented with a referendum that truly matters on O'ahu, where they had to decide whether to say go or no-go on the massive steel-rail mass transit system.

But this election may be remembered for more than winners and losers. It was a moment that changed the very dynamics of how elections are run.

The big event was the rise of absentee and early voting. Hawai'i saw a record number of people voting ahead of Election Day, and we were hardly alone. Early voting under liberalized rules was increasingly common across the nation.

What does this mean? It suggests that campaigns are no longer single-minded events pointed to a discrete final event: Election Day. Just as Christmas has become a season rather than a day, elections have become a stretched-out process rather than a singular event.

This changes the fundamental dynamics of a campaign. Traditionally, political managers worked to build toward a specific moment in time. The worst thing a candidate could do was to "peak" before that big moment.

Today, it is clear, a successful candidate must peak and then remain active for weeks leading up to Election Day. That changes the way campaigns are managed. We can look forward to longer and more intense campaigns. The day of the permanent or perpetual campaign is at hand.

Another seismic shift in this election was the maturing use of the Internet. This played out mostly at the national level, where Democrat Barack Obama made clever and innovative use of the power of the Internet.

Yes, candidates have had Web sites and fundraising operations on the Web for years.

But what Obama and his campaign did was use the Internet to create a virtual community of like-minded folks who organized themselves and shared ideas, energy and money on a massive scale. Call it old-fashioned grass-roots politics transformed for the electronic age.

In the future, any ambitious candidate will find ways to replicate this system, at the local as well as the national level.

Clearly, elections will always hinge on the personality and politics of the candidates. We vote for the candidate who can best serve our own selfish interests. But in this changed landscape, after 2008, the way campaigns are managed will be fundamentally different. They will be much longer and will take place in two places at once: On the street and in virtual reality.

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