As many people have written, if the election was global, it would have been a landslide for Obama, and the reaction here in Switzerland is quite positive.

We may be seeing the beginnings of presidential leadership that co-inspires mutual trust instead of conspiring to undermine public will.

The truth is -- and some Americans don't understand this -- the French also wanted the best for us.

President-Elect Obama is clearly a very smart guy and a very good politician. Unlike the last Dem with those credentials, he's also exceedingly disciplined. Those qualities will come up against a couple of very major problems.

Even now, after a pail of ice water has been dumped on his head, Bush is doing his utmost to govern for the few by destroying as many protective regulations as he can.

Obama's victory does not spell the end of racial disparity in America, but it is a ringing sign of progress, a triumph on the road to greater equality and realizing the Dream that Martin Luther King, Jr. revealed to us.

In today's very special "The Day After Yesterday" edition of Wilshire & Washington, Zach Tumin of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government joins our hosts to talk technology in the new administration.

Here are some comments I gathered on what Obama's victory means for America's image in the world, from thinkers such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Tariq Ramadan, and Garry Kasparov.

We set about the task of freeing ourselves from the darkness of this decade and the shadows that have for too long haunted us. In this respect, all of us -- all races -- are a little more free at last.

Nuclear Age Peace Foundation President David Krieger is drafting a special First 100 Days program. Dr. Krieger has already completed a briefing for the new president.

With a black man pulling off the astonishing feat of rising to the presidency in a land riven by racism for more than two centuries, there was a sense of extraordinary release, and even more extraordinary empowerment.

Although America is a young nation, we have pulled together many times to overcome seemingly overwhelming threats to not only our economy but to our basic way of life.

I did not fully understand the power of our inspired cliche; until I moved to a place - even one as civilized as France - where they are not born with it .

What we need from your presidency, Mr. Obama, is a vision of how every man woman and child on our planet is connected and poverty can be changed.

In my dream, America, the allegedly dazed and confused, passport-challenged nation of racist, fat people who voted George W. Bush into office twice, just elected an African-American man.

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Chants of "Obama! Obama!" and "Yes we can!" echoed through the popular Phnom Penh restaurant, while a supporter sporting an Obama mask worked the crowd.

For whatever else the election of Barack Obama accomplishes or fails to accomplish, I think it has put an end to the nearly-decade-long Age of Incuriosity of the Bush administration.

Acknowledging class was always difficult for "New Democrats" -- it was second-wave, it was divisive -- but 2008 made retro politics cool again.

Barack Obama's election proves that by doing the right thing, Lyndon B. Johnson and his party ultimately got their reward.

I was in D.C. last night -- at 10:30 pm I happened to walk past a very stuffy private club, one that as far as I can tell, is populated exclusively by hardcore Republican men in their later years.