are you racist or sexist?

good commentary on Obama's speech here.

(and commentary of varying quality here, here and here)

We turned on the speech in the library today to watch. There was a German lady there who just arrived this week, as she's chaperoning some German exchange students. She watched the speech with us and told us afterwards she was blown away that a politician would talk so openly about these sensitive issues. "And he's so well spoken!" She said she was going to make the German students watch the speech to help them understand this country. When he was talking about Rev. Wright she was confused because she didn't know who he was or anything about that story. I tried to explain what was going on, but I'm not sure how successful I was. (I'm guessing the language barrier wasn't so much the problem, as her English was pretty good, but rather it was just the bizarre nature of our political discourse)
But on the whole her reaction made me feel really good for some reason. I guess her being from another country I just really enjoyed the feeling of taking pride in one of our leaders (of course he's still got a ways to go in this election, but we can at least call him a "prominent Senator.")