SUPER BOWL JOURNAL: Al Michaels Knows Cedar Rapids

Al Michaels (above), who will work his seventh Super Bowl as a network television play-by-play man Sunday night, has family ties in Cedar Rapids.

 In a more serious matter, I asked Keith Olbermann what he remembers when he thinks about last January's Iowa caucuses. Olbermann, whose primary job is host of MSNBC's "Countdown," seemed happy to respond.

Olbermann called Barack Obama's win in the Iowa Democratic Party caucuses "an extraordinary and significant stop on a very long path that was an affirmation of something I don't know everyone was confident of.

"In retrospect, and in the future they'll have to teach this to people, that there was some doubt whether or not middle America would support a non-white candidate for pres of the US to a significant degree, and it here it was.

"It was an indicator that enough people had moved, whether by their own evolution, whether by society's evolution, or by dint of the urgency of circumstance, had moved to visualize what was best for them with no racial component to it whatsoever.

"Which is really what we've all said we wanted. Here it was manifested. It was like here it is, sort of a miniature version of Election Night. Which was, you know, we've screwed up race relations in this country for 400 years, roughly. But guess which country was the first of the major Western nations, let alone democracies, to elect and choose an African-American or a man of African descent.