In which DCist rounds up the week in newsprint opinions.

This week may have marked incredible change for black America, the United States, the world — but it sure has been boring to read about it. With few exceptions the Metro area’s professional opinion writers competed to out-praise one another in the most ebullient terms over the accomplishment that is Barack Obama’s election.

Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell acknowledged that her investigation into readers’ complaints about election coverage discovered bias in favor of Obama and the Democratic Party. In a year’s worth of coverage, the Post published 1,295 horse-race stories and just 594 issues stories. (Last week, Howell praised the Kids Post section for running six of those issues stories.) Howell continues:

The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces about McCain, 58, than there were about Obama, 32, and Obama got the editorial board’s endorsement. The Post has several conservative columnists, but not all were gung-ho about McCain.

Desmond Tutu’s column today would fall into that “laudatory” category. Calling the news “true, exhilaratingly true,” the South African activist writes, “I want to jump and dance and shout, as I did after voting for the first time in my native South Africa.” To compare Obama’s election to the surpassing human rights revolution that was the fall of apartheid would seem to collapse an entire century of American progress on race and civil rights to a single point on Tuesday — though I for one am loathe to suggest to Desmond Tutu how he ought to perceive the election of the first black U.S. president.

Jonetta Rose Barras offered a more sober analysis, describing the rise of the black “race-neutral leadership class,” of which Obama is a member (if not the leader). Barras writes about Obama’s leadership style and figurehead status within the black community, summarizing points that many observers greeted over the course of the election as a sign of change to come but led others, like Jesse Jackson, to want to cut Obama’s balls off.

A number of Barras’s remarks point simply to the generational difference between Obama and other black leaders. “As president, he’s unlikely to embrace the confrontational identity politics that have defined black activism for so long,” writes Barras. Yet on other points, Barras indicates but does not address the continuity in leadership Obama promises. “He has decried the low-hanging pants fashion so popular with young black men, blasted rapper Ludacris for offensive song lyrics and called on fathers to take responsibility for their families.” Know who else eats for free at Ben’s Chili Bowl?

The Politico could hardly find a negative word to publish about president-elect Obama. Netroots Nation chairman Adam Bonin, who took one of Obama’s seminars back in the day, remembers a passage from a W.E.B. DuBois essay (“The Souls of Black Folk”) that Obama once assigned. Responding with inspired wit in the face of adversity — or proving that he didn’t understand the task at hand — Republican strategist Tom Korologos gave one sentence to Politico: “I don’t want it to get around but the Democrats have fallen into our trap.”

In the end, Atlantic Monthly blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates won the hope-off with a “crazy good” essay, touching off on the Rev. Joseph Lowery’s 2007 Obama endorsement and expanding to illustrate Obama’s inheritance from Martin Luther King, Jr. Coates writes:

It’s one thing to believe in yourself, to think that you can swim in the deep end, to believe that you can make it with determination and without a college degree — but it’s a much, much greater thing to believe in yourself and also in people whom you’ve never met.

Here is where Barack Obama and the civil rights leaders of old are joined — in a shocking, almost certifiable faith in humanity, something that subsequent generations lost.

Acute and indeed encouraging words, at least for those who voted Obama. Though, those self-same voters will be indulged if they argue instead that the most hopeful opinions this week bubbled up from the right. “We Didn’t Just Lose a Race. We Lost Our Bearings” (Dov Zakheim, Post), “The Right Needs To Get Centered” (Rich Lowry, Post), even Democratic Party Hypocrisies (a grasping Debra Saunders, Washington Times)? That’s the good gospel liberals have been waiting to hear.

Newseum front-page photos by Flickr user bullneck (one, two, three). Washington Post front-page photo by Flickr user Daniel.