How did Hillary Clinton's simple observation (that "another part of the civil rights revolution was Lyndon B. Johnson's masterful stewardship of the relevant legislation through Congress") manage to hit a political Third Rail?

John McWhorter has an interesting take on Hillary Clinton's supposed "attack" on Martin Luther King -- it's hypersensitivity bordering on paranoia:

To be able to hold in one's mind the notion that Mrs. Clinton would attack King suggests a bone-deep hypersensitivity that overrides sequential reasoning. "We have to be very, very careful how we speak about that era," Rep. Clyburn explains.

But why so very, very careful? What effect does it have on anyone's life if that era is occasionally discussed in less than perfectly genuflective phraseology? Is the Klan waiting behind a hill? Will a black man working at an insurance company in Cleveland have a breakdown because someone didn't give King precisely enough credit in a quick statement?

There is a willful frailty, a lack of self-confidence, in this kind of thinking. It suggests someone almost searching for things to claim injury about, donning the mantle of the noble victim in order to assuage a bruised ego.

Of course, there is a less depressing interpretation of the current uproar: Mrs. Clinton's critics are playing political hardball. You know, let's get blacks to vote for Mr. Obama by playing the race card to pretend Mrs. Clinton is dumping on King. John Edwards, for example, is obviously not mouthing agreement with these people out of insecurity about his blackness.

In the name of speaking for Mr. Obama, the people throwing these tantrums are presenting a parochial, cynical face, rather than the thoughtful, cosmopolitan one that the candidate himself is trying to show.

Overall, Mr. Obama has not run a "black" campaign. The past few days suggest that if he did, many would consider it a favor to him to churn up 10 more months of dustups over phrases carefully lifted out of context and held up as evidence of racism. Hopefully Mr. Obama is too smart, and too much a man of the world, to succumb to this twisted rendition of black identity.

The problem for Obama is that his image as a "refreshing new candidate who happens to be black" violates a cardinal rule of identity politics and sets him up for the charge of being "not black enough." If he consistently refuses to take the bait, he'll be defying a long Democratic Party tradition. But the problem for him is that while he may not need this tradition, the party depends on it.

The question is this: will Obama be able to move his party past this paranoid, condescending race-obsessed nonsense?

Not if the people who consider it their bread and butter can stop him.