Several hours later, the right words or image can still get me misty.

I still can’t get over that “I never thought I’d see” feeling. I took a while to warm up to Obama during the primaries and part of that was because of his race. Until last late night, I believed the first President who wasn’t a white man would be someone who, as Wanda Sykes put it, “someone who knows what Uncle Tom’s Cabin looks like from the inside”. That’s why Obama’s speech on race meant a lot to me, he frankly discussed an issue I expected he would minimize to get elected. That he took such a nuanced view of the issue did worry me in these days of sound bite politics — I’ve supported politicians who could speak with a similar level of clarity and insight before and they usually lost to someone good at framing and feeding the media sound bites.

The last time I was so pleased by an election, Willie Brown’s crew were voted out in San Francisco. It’s a good feeling.