(The Penn ID-card lady marveled that mine is the first she ever made - after making thousands - that says both "student" and "faculty.")

This is a great year to double my usual connection to twentysomethings because of the Obamanon.

As many have noted, Sen. Barack Obama has captured the imagination of younger voters, especially women. My policy class is no exception, and each week the students and I banter back and forth, I playing the role of older Hillary Clinton supporter and they of youthful Obama backers.

What's so fascinating about this choice is the way Democratic Party identity politics is stood on its head. Among my post-race, post-gender, post-partisan students, Obama represents a perfect portfolio of candidate qualities.

It doesn't really matter what his policy proposals are when Obama himself represents the values that many of my students care about most. (Note: We also teach sampling theory at Penn, and I don't want anyone to think I'm reporting that all or even most Penn students favor Obama over Clinton or John McCain.)

This effect is doubly powerful because many younger women seem scandalized by the thought of voting for a woman just because she's a woman. To these young women, such a thing is a sign of weakness, not solidarity.

You see the irony. Old identity politics would give Clinton an edge over Obama because half the population is female while only one in eight is African-American (and far fewer are of mixed ancestry).

But in the new identity politics, the best way to move beyond old battles is to vote for the candidate who doesn't share your attributes. Under that kind of reverse arithmetic, it is more satisfying for a larger number of voters to support Obama.

Of course, following this logic, a white guy like me can vote for either Clinton or Obama. So why I do support Hillary Clinton? Certainly not out of any disregard for Barack Obama.

Partly because I'm a father of a daughter and have a sentimental hope to see a woman be president, and I understand that sounds like a sentiment from the 1970s. And after 25 years of marriage, I think the world would be a better place if women ran it.

NOW I realize there are many people who find those feelings totally irrelevant to choosing a Democratic nominee. So let me give you another reason I'm supporting Clinton.

She wins the big states. You've no doubt heard this argument. Why does it matter so much? Two words: electoral college.

A candidate can win the presidency by winning the 11 biggest states, even if he doesn't get a single vote in the other 39. Nine of those 11 states have already voted and Clinton won all but two. Assuming she wins Pennsylvania and gets John Edwards' help to win North Carolina, Clinton will win nine of the 11.

As we've seen in both 2000 and 2004, this extreme case raises all kinds of legitimacy issues. The real strategy is more nuanced and has to do with winning big states that swing between parties in the general election, like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Missouri.

Clinton wins the big states, and that's the key to getting a Democrat in the White House. I hope Obama joins that ticket, but regardless, Clinton is the surest vote for change that wins. *

Mark Alan Hughes is the Robert A. Fox Leadership Fellow at Penn and a second-year architecture student at PennDesign. E-mail: mahughes@sas.upenn.edu.