Breakthrough

I haven't had a chance to explore the blogosphere today, so there may be a zillion people out there saying the same thing I'm about to say, but I thought it was worth mentioning:

The mainstream media - by which I mean all of the TV network news shows, the cable news stations and the newspapers I've seen - are making the lead on the election story the fact that Barack Obama is the first African American elected president of the United States.

That's certainly true, and it's also certainly noteworthy. But it's also a rather exclusionary and perhaps divisive way of stating what happened yesterday. So here's something else to think about: Barack Obama is the first person elected president of the United States whose ancestry is not solely or predominantly Northern European.

The vast majority of our presidents have been of English descent. Then there was Kennedy, who of course was Irish (as was Reagan), the Roosevelts (Dutch) and Eisenhower (German). But we've never had a president whose forebears hailed from any of the Southern European or Mediterranean countries (the only major-party nominee from that region that I know of was Michael Dukakis, who is second-generation Greek), let alone anywhere outside Europe.

In other words, throughout the history of this country, our image of what a U.S. president looks like has been a white (very white) male. But now, as the U.S. population grows more diverse, we've finally broken away from that stereotype. And given the power of the president as a symbolic figure, not only in public life but also in the psyches of individuals, that's a pretty momentous change - maybe the beginning of a complete reimagining of what this country is all about.