There was no question mark on the headline at the top of Page 1 in Thursday's York Dispatch, but I took it as a question anyway.

"Eager to play a primary role" is what it said.

And my response to what seems like a question is -- darned right.

The Republican race won't mean anything in the April 22 Pennsylvania primary, since U.S. Sen. John McCain already has his party's nomination nailed down.

However, for the first time since, well, maybe since forever, Pennsylvania will play a decisive role in choosing the Democratic candidate for this year's presidential race. It's either U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton or U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, and they're running neck-and-neck, with Obama leading by about 140 committed delegates. In this campaign, that's either a sizeable advantage or a dead heat, depending upon which horse you're backing.

So Pennsylvania's 158 delegates could make a huge difference to either candidate. Not enough to win, but enough to close or expand the gap. Which is ironic as all get out, I think, since bigwigs and littlewigs throughout the state were, not too long ago, talking about rescheduling the state's primary to earlier in the year to assure that our primary actually had some meaning in the grand scheme of things.

Nothing was changed, of course. And here we are in the thick of things anyway. I love it.

Even if Hillary and Barack more or less divide the delegates down the middle, in which case neither candidate will gain an edge, there's likely to

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be a huge mess waiting for Democrats at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in late August.

The longer this goes, the more interesting it gets. Because at some point down the road, Democrats are going to have to deal with the issues of superdelegates (which are about evenly split at this time) and an earlier decision to strip Michigan and Florida of their Democratic delegates as punishment for changing their primary election date without permission.

This is going to get good, I'm telling you.

And to make matters even more problematic, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell came out a couple of weeks ago with a statement -- "You've got conservative whites here, and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate" -- that served to ruffle lots of feathers in these parts.

Rendell, of course, is backing Hillary Clinton. So maybe his comment was off the top of his head and not intended to be offensive, or maybe he was making a statement calculated to remind conservative whites throughout the state that Obama is black. As if they didn't already know that.

Either way, I didn't like it. Rendell's statement was true enough, I suppose, but the timing of it rubbed me the wrong way. I didn't like the race card being played in a campaign that should have nothing to do with race or, for that matter, gender.

Anyway, last weekend, I heard a talking head on TV referring to some Republican and independent
voters in Pennsylvania "looking to do some mischief" by changing their voter registration to Democrat. It was his suggestion that Republicans were changing registration to wreak havoc in the Democratic primary.

I'm a conservative white voter. I've been registered Republican for 40 years, at least, in York County where Republicans have a considerable advantage. But in this primary, I was a Republican without anyone to vote for that matters.

Hey, I didn't make the rules, but I'll play by them. I must be one of those voters "looking to do some mischief," because I changed my voter registration more than a week ago. I received my new voter registration card Wednesday. I'm officially a York County Democrat.

And I'm telling everyone up front, my vote will be for Obama. This conservative white will vote for a black man. Win, lose or draw, I fully intend for my vote to cancel out Gov. Rendell's vote for Hillary.

Like I said, it's going to be an interesting campaign right to the bitter end.

Am I eager to play a primary role? You betcha.

Columns by Larry A. Hicks, Dispatch columnist, run Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. E-mail: lhick s@yorkdispatch.com.