It was, superficially, pure coincidence that Nancy Pelosi and Deval Patrick took their precedent-setting oaths of office at almost the same hour Thursday.

Pelosi became the first female speaker of the House of Representatives, second in line to the presidency. And Patrick became the first African-American governor of Massachusetts, only the second black state chief executive elected in the history of the United States.

Impressive as their individual resumes are, what is more significant is what their elevation signals: a growing sense of inclusiveness and opportunity in this society.

The United States has many challenges and shortcomings, but occasionally it is appropriate to take note of the ways in which this country is overcoming past prejudices. Thursday was such a day.

It is not really an accident that these breakthroughs occurred simultaneously. The generation that is now producing major leaders is a generation substantially freed of the sexism and racism of its predecessors.

Decades of men and women of different races going to school together, working in the same offices and factories, and serving in the same military have changed attitudes. Gender and racial differences have shrunk to a manageable size.

What is striking is that Pelosi and Patrick were elevated by their opposites. Pelosi leads a House of Representatives where men outnumber women, 364 to 71. Patrick was elected by a constituency that is nearly 90 percent white.

In neither case was the gender or race of the person competing for power the determinant of the outcome. Those who were deciding were able to look past these obvious characteristics to weigh their skills and leadership potential.

Skeptics will argue that in 21st-century America, women and blacks still face barriers that make their climb to the top harder. And that is true. Pelosi worked anonymously for years in Democratic politics before another woman, the dying Rep. Sala Burton, endorsed her as her successor – an endorsement that helped Pelosi win her first and toughest primary. Once in the House, she showed the canniness and drive that built the alliances that eventually made her the Democratic leader and the majority party’s choice for speaker.

Patrick got his break when he was one of the poverty-stricken black youths in Chicago chosen to receive a scholarship to the elite Milton Academy in Massachusetts. There he starred academically and went on to Harvard and a law career both in the Justice Department and in two major corporations.

But their success is not unique, and is part of a pattern that shows the progress this society – and not just a few exceptional individuals – has made.

While both Pelosi and Patrick are Democrats, and proudly part of a party that abandoned its racist past to become a champion of civil rights, Republicans have also moved with the times. The two secretaries of state named by President Bush, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, are both African-Americans. Powell is a product of the U.S. Army, one of the great egalitarian institutions of the past generation, and Rice rose in an academia that increasingly treated women as equals.

Their predecessor in the Clinton administration’s State Department was Madeleine Albright, a woman and an immigrant – a combination that was unimaginable in such a position in any previous time.

The United States has not reached perfection. Discrimination still exists in many forms and in many places. But the progress is real – and well worth celebrating.

More about Ford. One final postscript to the wonderful tributes last week to Gerald R. Ford – a story told to me by Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin.

Two years ago, on a visit to Washington, Ford spent an hour chatting with members on the floor of the House, where he had served for so many years.

Obey, one of the few current members who actually served with Ford, told the former president that he was finishing up a memoir in which he discussed all the presidents he’d known in Washington, from Richard Nixon to the current President Bush.

“You’ll be surprised,” said the liberal Democrat, “but I’ve written that you were the best president of the bunch.”

Ford paused for a moment and then replied with a smile, “Pretty slim pickings, wasn’t it?”

That is so typical of the man – modest, honest, realistic and good-natured, all at once.