Dr. Ralph asks: The whole political spectrum is a mess… If you alone were able to decide who would lead our country for the next four to eight years who would you choose and why?

Doc, I’m stumped. I’m going to open this one up to the peanut gallery. Make your case in the comments for whom you would hand-select as the next president.

DirtyDennis asks: Why isn’t anyone asking the obvious? Let’s not dance around it: Is there a realistic chance for a black or a woman to win the presidential election?

Dear Dennis: Your question really has two parts. A) Is America ready for a black or woman president? And B) Is America ready for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama?

The answer to A is an unequivocal yes. There’s clearly a majority of Americans who would unhesitatingly vote for an otherwise qualified candidate who happened to be a woman or an African American. But the rub is that overwhelming majority is split among the parties. So that Republicans who might comfortably vote for Condi Rice certainly aren’t going to vote for Obama or Clinton.

My point is that party and ideological orientation are far more powerful factors in securing the White House than race or gender in 2008. Imagine for a second if Colin Powell had never served in the Bush White House, were thus untainted by the Iraq war, and were the Democratic nominee. Experience, off-the-charts national security credentials. He’d win in a landslide.

Yes, clearly, there’s a subset of voters who would vote against either Hillary or Barack just on the basis of bias. But 2008 is shaping up to be a magnificent year to be a Democrat — the kind of wave election that can overcome all sorts of built-in disadvantages.

Larry Sabato, a veteran handicapper, thinks Hillary needs the biggest boost: “Hillary is going to get the generic Democratic vote minus about 5 percent. That is to say, a Democrat will have to be heading toward a landslide for Hillary to win. Narrowly.”

Does the same go for Obama? “I’m still wondering about,” says Sabato. “I know he’s stronger than Hillary. Race is a plus or a minus — it can help you more than it can hurt you if you play it right. He’s the equivalent of putting a badge on a white suburbanite and the badge says ‘I’m not a racist; I voted for Obama.”

Sixinonehand asks: Is there a candidate on the horizon, in ANY party, that will have the balls to stand up to the oil/coal industry and actually subsidize some taxpayer money for the conversion to renewables (sun, wind, water)?

Dear SixIn: Of the top tier candidates, the only one who strikes me as truly understanding that global warming poses far more than a political problem — to their candidacies from eco-conscioius voters who need to be appeased — and, in fact, constitutes a planetary crisis of nearly biblical proportions is John Edwards.

Hillary seems to want technology to bail us out as we “begin to try” to reduce greenhouse emissions. Obama’s flirtation with liquid coal shows he’s got a lot to learn.

Edwards promises to stick it to polluters — those oil/coal producers you mentioned — with a carbon tax cleverly disguised as an auction. From his recent interview with Rolling Stone:

I have the most aggressive plan: It calls for an 80 percent reduction by 2050 in greenhouse gasses. You get there by capping carbon in America, and ratcheting down the cap every year. Beneath the cap, you auction off the right to emit any greenhouse gasses, using that money — $30-$40 billion — to transform the way we use energy, which means wind, solar, and cellulose based bio-fuels. You put at least a billion dollars into developing carbon sequestration technology, a billion into making sure we’re building more fuel efficient vehicles — in addition to raising fuel efficiency standards, which the president has the authority to do. It also means decentralizing the way we provide electricity in this country….

Edwards sounds every bit as strong on this stuff as Al Gore. Nobody else is talking about power grid decentralization. It’s wonky, but very important stuff. If you’re looking for an integral, transformative energy- and climate- policy, Edwards looks to be your guy.

Borracho asks:

“With all of the focus on Obama’s race, Hillary’s tough bitch image, and Edward’s haircut, what does a mucho, macho Mestizo like Richardson have to do get some news coverage? Especially since he is the only one of these candidates who can actually say he has accomplished something during his career?”

Hey Borracho: Most important, I think Richardson needs to do more to play up the fact that, Anglo surname aside, he is indeed a ‘Mucho Macho Mestizo’. In a year of path-breaking candidates, he’s arguably the path-breaking-est. We’ve seen credible African Americans run for president. And credible women run for president. Heck, an African American woman once ran for president. But we’ve never seen a candidate like Richardson.

His grandparents are two Spaniards, a Mexican, and a Smithsonian biologist from Boston. He grew up on a hacienda in Mexico city, moving to Boston for high school before becoming a star pitcher at Tufts, a congressman, a U.N. ambassador, an Energy Secretary and a Governor. He personifies not only the American melting pot as Obama does, but also its immigrant story.

But with the last name Richardson, he can confuse people: According to a recent poll, more than half of American Latinos said there was no Latino in the race. Indeed, fewer than a third of Latinos identified Richardson as a member of ‘la raza.’

Chew on that for a second. Can you imagine what Hillary or Barack’s numbers might look like if only a third of women or African Americans recognized that they weren’t just everyday white guys?

Now, with the current anti-immigrant backlash (read: brown panic) sweeping segments of America — and lily white states like Iowa and New Hampshire are hardly immune — running as a Hispanic has its pitfalls. Which is perhaps why Richardson is running on his resume — and seemingly soft-pedaling his ethnicity. “I’m not running as a Hispanic,” the Governor told me in a recent interview. “I’m running as a governor who is proud to be Hispanic.”

Richardson is running as a Hispanic the same way Rudy Giuliani is running as an Italian. Maybe that’s just who he is and how he sees himself. But by forgoing the media bonanza that could have come his way by, say, announcing his candidacy on Univision or Telemundo, Richardson missed a chance, in the early days of the campaign, to have his name grouped with Hillary’s and Obama’s in every single discussion about the novelty and diversity of the Democratic nominees.

Instead, Richardson has seemed content to allow that limelight accrue to Clinton and Obama, while he runs solely on his resume. Which is a shame. Because instead of stories like — “There are three novel candidates in the Democratic field; And you’ll never guess who is most experienced?” — Bill Richardson has been treated like Joe Biden with a tan.