For Bill and Hillary Clinton, these are uncharted waters.

Never in more than three decades of public life have they been on the defensive side of racial bigotry. To the contrary, each -- and especially he -- has enjoyed honorary membership in the black community. While president, he was even inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame and is absurdly but frequently referred to as America’s “first black president.” She has floated on those coattails.

But the ascendancy of Barack Obama, now a serious and indubitable threat to Hillary’s candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president, has thrown the Clintons off their game.

Mr. Clinton was conspicuously irritated when he snapped, at a campaign appearance, that “This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” Immediately before that, he was criticizing Obama’s positioning on the Iraq war. But the fairy tale comment took on a broader interpretation. It sounded like Clinton was attacking the very idea that Obama could be a serious candidate.

Then the former First Lady said something that raised hackles higher. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. may have spoken eloquently and compellingly about civil rights, but she noted, it took a president -- namely Lyndon Johnson -- to make civil rights a reality.

Yeouch. Just ask the producers of “Mississippi Burning” how much flack you can get for making white folks the heroes of black advancement or justice.
 
It’s true that LBJ cajoled the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts into being. But, it is inarguable that the impetus, the righteousness and the prescriptions of the laws came from King and the thousands of black men, women and children who pushed through hell itself for causes that Mr. Johnson -- and Mr. Kennedy before him -- would have likely ignored if not prompted by moral demand.

What the Clintons have unintentionally exposed is our entry into the danger zone of the political landscape -- namely, the intersection of race and power. Each has precarious terrain on its own, but that junction is fraught with unique hazards. That’s why Republican connivers like Karl Rove are portraying Hillary Clinton as the most fit for office among the Democrats. It’s much easier to sidestep the thorns of gender politics than to navigate the minefield of racial politics.

Of course, this is what happens to a country that refuses to apologize for past injustices, sneers at reparations, berates every grievance as “whining” and accuses people who endure quantifiable disparities with their white countrymen of wallowing in victimhood.

This is what happens when, instead of doing the hard, dirty excavation work of reconciliation, which first involves confession, society tries to pave over the problem with “color blindness” and the charge to “just move on.” 

Any other year and the little nasties that are spewed by one candidate against another may be taken as playing hardball. But this time, there is a black man in serious contention for the first time, and what is said about his entitlement to power and his fitness for office can be awfully tricky, largely because of all that heretofore has been left unsaid. Beneath all that are booby traps that are liable to go off when least expected. And, as the Clintons are learning and the Republican Party fears to its core, somebody can get hurt.

The former First Couple are trying now to repair this unforeseen rift with one of their most loyal constituencies. It is all the more urgent that they do so now that the South Carolina primary approaches. The Palmetto State will be the first real test of the black vote this election year.

What they don’t need are folks like black billionaire Bob Johnson fueling the fire.

The Clintons, he told a South Carolina audience yesterday, “have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues – when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood; I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in his book ... ”

While the Clintons might have been surprised by the reaction to their comments, Johnson has left himself no room to spin. No code talk, no ambiguities. Just a direct hit, a low blow from a man hugely invested in the establishment.

The Clintons should part company with Johnson, just as they did the white staffer who tried to make an issue of Obama’s long-ago experimentation with drugs, which he brought up first.

But they won’t. That might make Bob Johnson seem like a wronged black man.