To understand how Barack Obama won the presidential primary, you have to look at what he learned when he lost.

Obama defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton solidly in the Iowa caucuses in January, but five days later she beat him, painfully and unexpectedly, in New Hampshire. That loss showed him that toppling the royal family of Democratic politics would not come easily.

"I think this was meant to be," Obama said privately the next day, recalls adviser David Axelrod. "I think we were flying too close to the sun, like Icarus. When you're fighting for change, it's not supposed to be easy."

In Greek mythology, Icarus' father gives him wax wings that empower him to fly, but warns of the danger in soaring too high. Obama got similar warnings. When he arrived in Washington, Senate dean Robert Byrd cautioned him not to be in too much of a rush to leave for the White House.

But like Icarus, Obama wouldn't heed his elder's advice. Icarus would crash into the sea. Obama would learn from his own crash in New Hampshire and make history.

George Lucas has created legendary film heroes like Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones, but the US director says that in real life, his hero is Barack Obama.

Lucas was in Japan on Wednesday to promote his latest film, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," as Obama clinched the Democratic Party's nomination for president.

"We have a hero in the making back in the United States today because we have a new candidate for president of the United States, Barack Obama," Lucas said when asked who his childhood heroes were.

Obama, "for all of us that have dreams and hope, is a hero," Lucas said.

"I cried all night. I'm going to be crying for the next four years," he said. "What Barack Obama has accomplished is the single most extraordinary event that has occurred in the 232 years of the nation's political history. . . . The event itself is so extraordinary that another chapter could be added to the Bible to chronicle its significance."

The excitement was less about Obama's foreign policy--which remains vague--than a sense that his victory marks a historic moment.

Michael Cox, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, said Obama's win "has sent out a lot of positive signals around the world."

"He has a very appealing persona--elegant, fluent, strings lots of sentences together into paragraphs," Cox said. "But in terms of (his) actual policies towards the Middle East, Iraq, Iran, China, Europe--actually, we don't know."