A former Clinton campaign aide has launched a web petition, voteboth.com., in hopes of reviving the notion of a Democratic “dream ticket.”

The site doesn’t specify who would be on the top of the ticket. But it was sponsored by something called Democrats United for Clinton—slash–Obama ’08.

We went to Oakland’s delegate caucuses to find out if the idea appeals to Democrats.

First, it was Peggy Noonan.  Now, it’s Geraldine Ferraro.  What is it with white women using the race card to demean Barack Obama’s candidacy?

Geraldine Ferraro, the 1984 vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket with Walter Mondale — the first and only woman to ever hold a VP bid — said this to a Torrance, Ca., newspaper last week:  “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.  And if he was a woman, he would not be in this position.  He happens to be very lucky to be who he is.  And the country is caught up in the concept.”

Ferraro’s comments are ridiculous on many levels.  But what’s more outrageous is that her statement seems to echo an earlier argument made by a prominent, female pundit on the right.

In a Feb. 29 Wall Street Journal piece entitled “Try a little tenderness”, right-wing columnist Peggy Noonan blasted Obama’s wife Michelle for a gaffe she’d made earlier that week. “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country,” said the senator’s wife, a statement that would draw broad criticism as anti-American.

But Noonan’s column went beyond criticizing Michelle Obama for the ill-advised statement and called into question the privileged background of both Michelle and Barack Obama, their Ivy League educations and so on. 

And then the column took an astounding turn, when Noonan suggested that Michelle Obama was somehow especially privileged because she is black, as if being black in this day and age gave her an advantage. 

“Intelligent, strong, tall, beautiful, Princeton, Harvard, black at a time when America was trying to make up for its sins and be helpful,” Noonan said, “and from a working-class family with two functioning parents who made sure she got to school.”

Throughout the piece, Noonan painted a picture of two privileged African-Americans who had somehow gotten one up on white society.  She wrote as if the Obamas were the first couple vying for the presidency who had come from a privileged Ivy League background, as if that particular resume wasn’t a prerequisite for candidacy in this country. 

“A lot of white working-class Americans didn’t come up with those things.  Some of them were raised by a TV and a microwave and love our country anyway, every day,” Noonan wrote.

Coming from Peggy Noonan, this wasn’t all that surprising. 

But now, a prominent woman on the left is making the same claim.  Is this the dawn of a new age in which white people feel the right to play the race card?

It’s a question my parents, grandparents and teachers have been asking me for years.  Why don’t young people vote? 

And then the Iowa caucuses arrived. Record turnout of young people delivered the state to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and suddenly, the question from my elders changed.

“Why Obama?” they asked.  Is it his age? Is it his race? Is it the way he talks and the speeches he gives? 

No, I say.  None of the above.  The hype about youth turnout is just that: hype. 

It wasn’t just young people who gave Obama his first primary victory — it was college-educated voters young and old. 

 Youth voting data from the University of Maryland shows that education level is the single largest factor separating voters and non-voters 18 to 24 years old.  And despite the recent upward trend in youth voting since 2004, college-educated young people continue to dominate voter turnout by that age group.

According to the U.S. Census, there were 14.1 million undergraduates enrolled in American colleges in 2005, up from 12.4 million in 2000.  And enrollment is even higher today.  

In 2004, college-educated youth outvoted their non-college-educated peers 59 percent to 34 percent.  That trend continued last month on Super Tuesday, when one quarter of college-educated youth voters cast a ballot, compared to one in 14 non-college-educated youth.

Young people today, high school grads and PhDs alike, will inherit a series of problems created or left unsolved by the generations that came before us — the war in Iraq, global warming, a middle class drowning in debt while working harder but making less — yet education continues to divide voters and non-voters in this age group.

So while the major networks and newspapers across the country have been touting the youth vote as a new, potentially powerful base for younger, inspirational candidates like Obama, I don’t believe anything has changed. Educating people creates more politically active citizens, a fact we have all known for years.

>> a slightly condensed version of this was published in the Insight section of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Despite her decades of political experience and staff of campaign experts, Hillary Clinton doesn’t seem to get this.

In a speech to Ohioans yesterday, Clinton referred to herself as, “someone who’s not just in the speeches business – but will get America back in the solutions business.”
But what about the winning elections business?

Barack Obama is the candidate Democrats were wishing they had in October of 2004: A person who can deliver the Democratic message without sounding more like a college professor than a leader. A candidate whose speeches are so compelling that they can distract from the Republican chest pounding, tough on terror, “I will protect you,” message.

Huckabee’s answer: “Wolf, we’re not smart enough to think that far down the road.” Now that sounds like a page out of the Iraq war playbook.

Kim Geiger