Not to be immodest about the US progressive movement’s efficacy, but we apparently didn’t just win this for America’s sake. That’s some powerful good we worked in the world. 🙂

I realize that this is topically a bit bigger than the state blog beat, but we ought to take ownership of the meta/civilizational changes we helped create too.

Obama’s victory stirs Europe to confront race issue

LONDON – For months before Barack Obama’s election last week, his popularity ratings in Europe soared to levels never matched in America. Now that Obama is headed to the Oval Office as the first African-American president, his victory is prompting Europeans to confront some uncomfortable questions about race within their own countries.

In Britain, the head of the government’s Equality and Human Rights Commission sparked a public debate for saying that a minority politician as “brilliant” as Obama would struggle to “break through the institutional stranglehold on power within the Labor Party.”

“The problem is not the electorate, the problem is the machine,” Trevor Phillips, who is black, told The Times of London. “It’s institutional racism” that extends beyond a single political party, he said.

In France, meanwhile, the wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy has thrown her support behind a new campaign that seeks to wipe out racism and end the white stranglehold on France’s elite political and social institutions. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, a musician and former model, is backing a manifesto published over the weekend that is subtitled “Oui, nous pouvons!” (French for “Yes, we can!”).

Story here.