Obama’s rise heartens Annette Gordon-Reed, but she still sees a great deal of progress to be made.

Gordon-Reed:    I mean, I would never have thought, you know, a couple of years ago that… I mean, I never thought when he started this out.  I never thought, I did not think that he was going to get the nomination.  I would not have thought that he would get as far as he has.  Right now, looking at the polls, we don’t really know what’s going to happen on Election Day but no it is outstanding.  I mean his rise is outstanding and I’ve never met him.  I’ve… We both graduated from Harvard Law School and we have, every couple of years, we have sort of reunions of everybody [all] black graduates and he’s come back and spoken a couple of times and he’s just an incandescent personality and he’s clearly not otherworldly in a real sense.  I mean, just a remarkably talented person.  So, if it’s going to be anybody, it would be somebody like Obama.  So, on one hand that gives me a lot of hope that, because as I’ve said, things have definitely changed.