Democrat "sensitivity" lessons

George Will:

HILLARY Clinton's cam paign, useful at last, has in recent days added to the nation's stock of harmless merriment. It has done so by floundering around, like a dinosaur drowning in a tar pit, with the sticky problem of being as "sensitive" as good liberals, our multicultural role models, are supposed to be.

For decades, liberals, believing that "self-esteem" is a universal entitlement that is endangered by nearly universal insensitivity, have striven to make everybody exquisitely sensitive to slights. Liberals have become industrialists as an indignation industry has burgeoned. It writes campus speech codes, infests corporations with "sensitivity training" workshops and "consciousness-raising" retreats, and generally enforces the new right to pass through this vale of tears without tears or even being peeved.

It is unfair, and wonderful, that Clinton has been castigated for her insensitivity in uttering the incontestable truth that President Lyndon Johnson, as well as Martin Luther King Jr., was indispensable to enactment of the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965.

To his credit, Barack Obama seemed not quite able to conceal his boredom with his assigned role of slighted victim in the charade of being offended. His campaign, however, methodically played a muted part in the required dance of agreement.

Clinton's clanking, wheezing political jalopy, blowing its gaskets and stripping its lug nuts, has moved on from faulting Obama for a kindergarten essay (in which he supposedly revealed a presidential ambition that was unseemly around the teeter-totter) to accusing him of wanting to be reasonable, even likable. Is there nothing the man will not stoop to?

...

So what do Sens. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and former Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado, and Govs. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin, Tim Kaine of Virginia and Janet Napolitano of Arizona have in common?

Three things, actually. They are Democrats, they've been elected in red or swing states and they've endorsed Obama.

...

The preference of those eight people for Obama surely has something to do with what Clinton's campaign reveals about her. It has had serial misadventures in the racial minefield of liberalism's own making. Its clumsy competition in the sensitivity sweepstakes makes it seem like a quaint anachronism. It reeks of the synthetic racial and other sensitivity-mongering of the last third of the previous century.

Temperate Americans are surely thinking: Get. Over. It.

Conservatives suggesting the Democrat nominee have about as much credibility as liberals suggesting the Republican nominee, but Will does it in an entertaining fashion. His larger point about the silliness of racial politics is one that could benefit Republicans in the November voting, but I think Democrats will be back on their race baiting game by then.