Reuters
Folks are going to figure out real quick that unlike America, the rest of the world isn’t consumed or phased by “firsts”.
“I think it goes beyond the Middle East, and I think it’s a bigger phenomenon which is the leader of the biggest democracy in the world is now a person of color and that is going to give him what political scientists would call a legitimacy in the street around the world that I don’t think an American leader has had, ever perhaps.” (Mark Whitaker, NBC News Washington Bureau Chief)
Thomas Friedman also tried to make this case in a column back in June of ’08. Others have repeated this rationale as well.
