As best I can judge from talking to people, Obama’s election was a shock pretty much everywhere outside of the United States, confounding a lot of assumptions about who we are and what we are capable of doing.
To the Chinese it looks a bit like someone from Tibet had assumed a leadership role in China, to a lot of Europeans it’s as though a Muslim was now the leader of Germany - it’s actually much less revolutionary and unsettling to most Americans to have a mixed race president than either of those situations would be to the Chinese or the Germans, but international assumptions about the degree of institutional racism remaining in America so deep and so wrong that Obama’s election it seems as revolutionary to them as such a change in their own leadership. (In defense of their surprise, a lot of Americans were awfully surprised too).
Because in this country we are rapidly coming to see the Obama administration in terms of political ideology rather than racial identity I think it’s very difficult for us to comprehend that for much of the rest of the world - more deeply mired in religious, ethnic, racial and sometimes even tribal prejudice - this appears to be an absolutely revolutionary change, and the fact that it has occurred as part of an orderly and in fact many ways very ordinary political transition is deeply unsettling to many in parts of the world where it is assumed that this sort of change and progress is impossible.
Largely because most of us are mongrels, like myself as Irish-English-Dutch. And as my ancestors were here before the revolution, there's been plenty of time for other ethnic groups to be in there as well. My daughter's mother (my ex) was German Jew.
But as for the Chinese, or Japanese, and yeah probably the Germans, it would be very different.