GAIL: To be wrong again. Oh, I look forward to that. Thank you.

LESLEY: Alright, let’s try. Well let’s talk about race. During the primaries, I have to say that I was delighted to be able to tell my black friends — all of whom told me that this country would never vote for a black man — that they had at least gotten it wrong in the primaries. But now, Obama is telling audiences that he expects the Republicans to play the race card and a new poll says that 30 percent of Americans admit to some racial prejudice. What do you think? How much do you think race is going to determine the outcome of this election?

GAIL: I don’t know. And I stand by my not knowing, come hell or high water, on this one. But I’ve had a lot of talks with the Obama poll people who … I mean, we’ve always believed that when you poll on a race in which one of the candidates is black, you get a result in which the black candidate seems to be getting more votes than he really will get, because people are hesitant to say they won’t vote for a black person, even if they won’t. They swear that’s not true anymore, or that it never was true. They swear that their results are really good and that this is not as big a deal as we think it’s going to be. It’s hard for —

LESLEY: Obama’s people are saying it’s not as big a deal?

GAIL: Yeah.

LESLEY: OK.

GAIL: That that’ll be OK. I don’t know. It’s hard for me to imagine it will not be a big deal. But, especially in the younger generation, you do see that a lot of neighborhoods, a lot of communities have transcended the whole race question.

LESLEY: And a lot haven’t … can you see both —

GAIL: It’s so fast. It’s hard to believe it’ll happen so fast. But that said, you know, the stuff I have seen in my lifetime in this country is so extraordinary. When I was a kid — the polls I was just looking at — two percent of the people in this country thought that interracial marriages were acceptable. And now the product of an interracial marriage is the Democratic nominee for president. When I was a kid, the idea that a woman could run for president was unthinkable. When I was a grown-up you got polls that said, well, perhaps a vice president some day.

LESLEY: Just a couple of years ago people said that.

GAIL: Yeah. I mean, the speed at which this country has changed on these issues is so extraordinary.

LESLEY: Well, look, we’ve had two secretaries of state who were African-American. We’ve had Richard Parsons, who’s the CEO of one of the biggest corporations in the country, Time Warner. And we had Stan O’Neal, who was the head of Merrill Lynch. I mean, it isn’t just Obama. You’re seeing a phenomenon, as you say, rapidly changing as we breath.

GAIL: Yeah. And you can certainly worry that we’re going to be disappointed. And a lot of people are going to vote against Barack Obama for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with race. But I do think … I read a lot of history books and, if you look in the short run, things are very depressing. But if you look in the long run, often you just are stunned by how much things have changed in this country for the better.