Talking about Europe as a single group here is rather nonsensical.
Definitely true... but it the IHT who goes around saying "Obama could never happen in Europe" and implying "the US is superior on race integration, as the Obama election shows."
I just attempt to highlight (in the rush of that kind of thing from the IHT) that the new "non-white" President comes out of a much different "ethnic minority" context, purely in terms of numbers, or "pool of population to draw candidates from", than exists in most European countries.
So comparing the percentage of with-a-non-French-grandparent to the percentage of blacks, asians or latinos in USA is disingenuous. There are indeed not enough representatives of recent minorities in France, but there is one major reason that reinforces the fact: they are recent. It's exceptional that the first generation goes into politics, especially when the immigrants were workers.
There are very few second generation Algerians of Obama's age in France, for example. Yet Obama needed all of Republican incompetence to get there, despite blacks having been there in great numbers for a couple of centuries. Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi
