Barack Obama opened the door with all the subtlety of somebody slamming one.

On “Meet the Press,” the freshman Democratic senator from Illinois was asked the same old question about whether he would run for president in 2008, but this time he had a new answer.

“I don’t want to be coy about this,” answered Obama. “Given the responses that I’ve been getting over the last several months, I have thought about the possibility. … After Nov. 7, I’ll sit down and consider it, and if at some point, I change my mind, I will make a public announcement, and everybody will be able to go at me.”

And we’re off.

Obama, with rainbow roots in Kenya and Kansas, has been out of the Illinois Legislature for less than a year and 10 months. During that time, he has tended to answer panting presidential inquiries with the suggestion that people ask him again after he’s done something.

But increasingly, Democrats are realizing that there’s a great advantage in what Obama hasn’t done: voted on the war in Iraq.

Not since Abraham Lincoln – who was never in the Senate at all, or even on “Meet the Press” – has Springfield, Ill., been considered a springboard to the White House. But it turns out to be the perfect place to have been in October 2002, when Democratic senators had to vote on giving George W. Bush the power to go to war, and have had to explain their vote ever since.

Obama won’t have to.

He won’t have to explain, as John Kerry did during the 2004 campaign, that he thought the war was going badly but still would have voted for it again, or to say as John Edwards does these days that he voted for it but now thinks he made a mistake. Obama won’t even have to go as far as Hillary Clinton, whose position seems to be that she voted for it but things sure haven’t turned out the way she expected.

Obama makes it clear that he opposes the war, a solid position now for a 2008 candidate. But unlike Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, the only Democratic White House hopeful who voted against it in 2002, Obama didn’t have to go through two years of public pounding for not supporting the troops.

For a Democratic presidential candidate in 2008, the ideal place to stand in October 2002 was back in Chicago, wondering why the Cubs had blown it again.

This has worked before. In 1976, Democrats had pretty much agreed that the Vietnam war that ended the year before had been a bad idea, but instead of nominating anyone involved in the decade of fighting over it, it seemed easier to pick Jimmy Carter.

Obama’s fellow senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, explained recently, “I said to him a while back, ‘You think that casting about here for four more years and casting 2,000 more votes will help you be a better president?’ “

Especially not when people are ready to hit you over the head with them.

Kerry cast so many votes that he voted for funding the war before he voted against it, which is why he’s still casting votes in the Senate.

Durbin went on to say that when candidates figure the right time to run is the next time, “The next time never comes.” Obama could check this out with former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, the Rhodes Scholar-New York Knick who arrived in the Senate with exactly the same aura of a president-in-waiting – but who spent a little too long waiting.

Nobody wants to listen to candidates’ résumés. Dan Quayle was in the process of describing his qualifications when he received the most devastating put-down in modern presidential politics.

But nobody’s ever going to tell Barack Obama that he’s no Jack Kennedy.

As to preparation, Obama said on the same TV show, “Well, I’m not sure anybody is ready to be president before they’re president.”

And sometimes, as we’ve learned recently, not even then.

What Obama does have is a moment, and the single best position that a Democratic candidate can have on the vote to go to war in Iraq:

He was nowhere near it.