With predictions flying all over the place about what’s going to happen as the presidential campaign moves forward, what’s obvious to me is that no one really has a clue.

Whether Hillary Rodham Clinton will continue to be propelled forward by the momentum she gained in New Hampshire, or Barack Obama – despite his upset there – will resume on a course that takes him into the White House, is anybody’s guess.

All we’ve learned so far is this: The baby boomers, who for decades have regarded ourselves as the primary agents of change in this country, and who thought we’d be the ones controlling what happens in this election, now know that we’re old-school, and that a whole generation of younger folks is making its bid to control things. Hence, Obama’s victory over Clinton in Iowa.

Yet we boomers refuse to go down for the count, and we staged a comeback in New Hampshire, led by middle-age women who weren’t about to stand by and see a good woman like Hillary Clinton get kicked around.

There has seldom been a presidential campaign as fluid as this one. This is aided by the fact that both Republicans and Democrats are desperate for a change from the knuckleheads who make up the current administration, and by the possibility that we could make history by electing the first female or the first black president in the country’s history.

Frankly, on the day after the election, if Hillary Clinton is the president-elect, I will no doubt be ecstatic over the fact of a woman president, even though I have yet to decide whether I’m supporting her. And if on the day after the election it turns out that Barack Obama has been elected, I’ll no doubt be carried away with excitement over the election of the first black president. And that will be true despite the fact that right now Obama isn’t doing it for me, either.

Because of the mess the Republicans have made of things, I will vote for the Democratic nominee. But all kinds of factors are going to affect who gets the nomination and who makes it to the White House. Among them are charisma and the appeal of relative youth and change, as exemplified by Barack Obama; the ongoing love affair with Bill Clinton and the desire by some voters to return the country to the Clinton era, as exemplified by Hillary Clinton; and the issue of character. Not whether the candidates are of good character or not, because they all appear to be. But whether they have true character, a firmly rooted belief in principles they are willing to stand up for, no matter what. And on this score, it seems John Edwards is the man. Add to these considerations the voters’ desire or reluctance to put a woman or a black in the White House, and how they all play out will determine who the Democratic nominee is. And Democrats will turn out in droves for that person because they so desperately want change.

Even though I’m a woman, I’m not crazy about Hillary because she has equivocated so much on so many issues – from the war, to abortion, to whether as president she would sit down and negotiate with our enemies – that I no longer have any idea what she stands for, other than wanting to get elected. And even though I’m black and find it impossible not to like Barack Obama, he still strikes me as a newcomer who hasn’t earned his presidential wings. I wish Edwards were doing better, but he’s not, so it’s clearly going to be Clinton or Obama. And whichever one of them seizes the momentum and holds onto it, I will vote for.

But with so many variables in play, nobody knows for sure how they’re going to pan out. Tom Brokaw was right when he said, after the wrongly called New Hampshire primary, that we in the news media should stop trying to predict what the voters are going to do, and wait until we see what they actually do. And last week when a TV interviewer asked me to predict who’s going to win the Democratic nomination, and the election, I told him I didn’t know and that I didn’t think anyone else knew either.