After the Civil Rights and Women's movements of the latter half of the 20th Century there entered a new trend in American conversation, that of Political Correctness.  It was no longer acceptable to make racist or sexist comments, especially for our elected officials.  While the sentiments might be there, they were hidden under symbolic acts, like Reagan kicking off his campaign in Philadelphia.  Anything too overt, like Clinton's comments on Jackson's win in South Carolina, and the masses go wild.  On the one side there are those that are sick of seeing "the race card," and on the other there are those that say they're sick of still seeing racism.  Either way, we all know that if you call someone a macaca, you can forget about a career in politics. 
One can argue that the whole PC thing has gone too far, to the point that it strangles legitimate discourse because everyone's afraid to say how they feel.  I would argue, though, that while some people are indeed too easily offended, overall being PC is working.  As younger people grow up in a world where it is not okay to call black people n*ggers, or degrade the abilities of women, not only are more people of color and females moving up in the world, but attitudes are literally changing.  This is most obvious when polls on racial attitudes are broken down by age group, such as the results from the recent Democratic primary in Indiana.  Obama has consistently been in the lead among younger voters, both black and white, while Clinton hangs on to her base with older white Americans, particularly those without a college degree.   Now, I've been saying for years that the only way this country will move past race is when all the old bigots die off, but I was always (mostly) joking.  Now, as I watch the news and read polls like this one from People Press, I realize that maybe there's more to the correlation of age and racial attitudes than I realized.  Consistently, younger people are less discriminatory, more willing to take a chance on a non-traditional (read: non-white/male) candidate.  Older voters are more likely to say that "equal rights have gone too far," that mixed race dating is not okay, and that women should return to more traditional roles.  While to a progressive the fact that anyone holds those attitudes is disappointing, it's still pretty logical.  If you grow up with bigotry, that's normal.  It takes a pretty strong mind to think outside the box of what is normal.  That's where the benefits of PC-ness come into play.  To my generation (X-Yish), for many of us, it is NOT normal to bash someone on the basis of race, gender, or even sexual orientation.  We didn't grow up with those kinds of attitudes, we grew up with the Huxtables and She-Ra and hip-hop.  Now, I'm not trying to say that there aren't racist youth, there totally are.  But it's not the norm, thanks to political correctness.  Thanks to political correctness, millions of young people look at Obama and see a candidate that is mixed race, not an uppity negro.  Thanks to political correctness Hillary Clinton wasn't laughed out of politics for being an over-ambitious housewife.  Thanks to political correctness, we're finally moving forward.  Here's hoping the older generations catch up.