“Thanks to the election of Barack Obama, a black president in Washington fiction will be no more exceptional than one in real life,” Hillel Italie of the AP writes. Washington thriller write David Baldacci notes, “Before Obama, you wouldn’t have gotten away with simply having a black president and having that on the periphery.” But Richard North Patterson adds: “He’s charismatic, with a young family, and he’s multiracial, and I think for all of those reasons it would be very hard to accept the sort of traditional, white Donald Rumsfeldian authority figure you see in a lot of presidential fiction.” […]