Is it too early for Hillary Rodham Clinton to suggest Barack Obama as her vice president on the ticket? Yes, absolutely. The answer for Clinton, however, appears to depend on your definition of what "smidgen" is.

Only "smidgens of difference," she said, separate them in the critical delegate count needed to win the Democratic presidential nomination. The operative word is derived from "smidge," or "barely detectable." For example, the 5,963,110 votes that Florida counted in the 2000 election allowed Gov. Jeb Bush to award his brother George W. a disputed victory. His margin of 537 votes - .0009 percent - was a smidgen.

The difference in delegates between the Democrats is about 7 percent - not a smidgen. Though neither has enough to win, it is Obama, with 1,567, not Clinton, with 1,462, who's leading. Still, she reckons the vice president option is hers to name.

When CBS pitched the "dream ticket" idea to Clinton, in fairness, she first allowed, "We have to decide who's on top of the ticket." Then, with a straight face, she added, "I think the people of Ohio [where she'd just won handily] very clearly said it should be me." It is just such humorless gall and an awkward sense of entitlement that turns voters off to the junior senator of Chappaqua via Arkansas and suburban Chicago.

Nowhere has this turnoff been more dramatic than among African-Americans, whose votes for Clinton and her husband in all their previous elections spiraled upward from 80 percent. It's not that Obama has wowed blacks as much as that the Clintons are duplicitous with them.

First she rolled the dice and demeaned the iconic civil rights struggle of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in favor of President Lyndon B. Johnson; then her husband blackjacked Obama's South Carolina victory by handcuffing him to civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.

Sacrificed once again on the altar of the Clintons' ambitions, their ever-loyal black voters looked for the exit. For once, they found a viable alternative in candidate Obama. Unlike the clubhouse politicians, the masses of black voters owe no outstanding debts to the Clintons. Indeed, the common good African-Americans enjoyed during the eight Clinton years has been largely reversed, while the evil he entrenched lives on.

This permanent harm blacks suffer includes President Clinton's welfare reform without sufficient safety netting; the removal of the FCC tax incentive for media ownership by minorities and women; and his extension of the federal policy mandating a 100-to-1 crack-to-powder cocaine prison sentencing.

Last week Bill Clinton, quite belatedly, said, "I regret more than I can say that we didn't do more" to end the disparate crack-to-cocaine sentencing. "I'm prepared to spend a significant portion of whatever life I've got left on the Earth trying to fix this, because I think it's a cancer," the former president said during a keynote speech at a University of Pennsylvania symposium commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission report on the civil unrest of the '60s. "We sentenced with a shotgun rather than a rifle," he said of the racist federal policy that disproportionately herds thousands of blacks off to prisons for long stretches - unjustly.

Hillary Clinton shies away from such Draconian policies of her husband's administration while taking full credit for the good times. When convenient, she will conjure victimization as a woman; when pressed she'll sic her junkyard spouse, fangs bared with the Deep South politics of the past century. As with King and in South Carolina, the tactic that troubles most is the thinly veiled appeals to that false sense of white supremacy, hinting that Obama is lazy, lacking in substance and given overmuch to smooth talking and likely drugs. This venomous impulse is suppressed to the point of denial in many older Americans - and not yet conditioned into the young. Within this generation of unspoiled voters resides the best hope of the nation.

In looking toward the Pennsylvania primary, and back at Florida and Michigan, the Democrats should keep to the high ground. Raw, nondemocratic personal ambitions, to say nothing of greed, avarice and stupidity, are what landed the country in the current quagmire. It's high time our political leaders wrest the government from the Bush-Cheney death grip and get back to nudging this republic toward a more perfect union.

In a stunning upset Saturday that could be a harbinger of trouble for the GOP this fall, a little-known Democratic physicist won the special election for a seat drawn to re-elect former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Bill Foster defeated Republican Jim Oberweis, who lost his fourth high-profile election in six years, following an expensive and highly negative contest.

The win gives Democrats another House seat until at least the end of the year. It also could serve as an omen for November, when two other Illinois congressional seats are up for grabs following Republican retirements and Sen. Barack Obama could bring out a huge turnout if he's the Democratic presidential nominee.

Foster won with 52 percent to Oberweis' 48 percent with nearly all of the unofficial vote counted late Saturday.