Hillary Clinton’s Pres. Johnson versus MLK comments on civil-rights-era progress were seen as insensitive and wrongheaded and caused a flap about her understanding of issues of race in the country she wants to lead. The flap has died down, finally, but the remarks remain instructive heading into Super Tuesday.

Referring to voting rights legislation and desegregation, she said that although King was the poet of the moment, it took Johnson, as president, to “get it done.” But what a narrow view of events such a version of history betrays— her not thinking that without the poetry of the King speeches and the poetic and dangerous work on the streets he undertook and from which the speeches were made, there would have been no getting anything done. In fact, there were a hundred years worth of presidents brimming with “experience” who had failed to get a single bit of it done.

The New York Times yesterday, fresh off its endorsement of her candidacy, featured a long front-page story on “Clinton’s Gradual Education on Issues of Race.” It detailed her inspiring evolution from suburban Republican Goldwater Girl— the dream daughter of her racist father, Hugh Rodham, and of the privileged lily white enclave in which he made their home— to leftist campus activist and politician. It’s an amazing story of her generation— that much-discussed 60s generation, to which we owe much of the social progress we enjoy today.

Yet it is a story of the past. Yes, we are still fighting the 60s battles for expanded equality on all fronts, but now, “to get it done,” there are alternative options— and a suddenly glaring one at the top— to simply asking another “nice white person” to do right for American communities of color and people of all races across the country similarly seeking expanded opportunities and equal treatment under the law.

The Times article, in a revealing phrase, reports that “By the time Mrs. Clinton moved to Arkansas in 1974, she had acquired a number of African-American friends and colleagues.” Clinton had been living and working in DC and other east coast cities for decades and yet she had made no real black friends? Then as a forty-something governor’s wife in an Old South state she “acquires” a “number” of black friends… This is great and all, but, again, we now have options. It all casts into a different light the Obama debate remark that, while he was organizing on the impoverished Chicago south side during the Reagan years, she was a “corporate lawyer on the board of Wal-Mart.” Clinton has tread the path of an uber-Baby Boomer liberal. Always willing to help the underprivileged, but mostly from the comfortable heights of wealth and privilege. The Times quotes Maggie Williams, Clinton’s former chief of staff, to say that Clinton has always viewed civil rights within a larger portfolio of causes. “Low wages, poor health care and lack of educational opportunities… etc.”

It is Lani Guinier, the first tenured black professor at Harvard law school, Bill Clinton’s aborted nominee for Assistant Attorney General and an Obama supporter, who best sums up in the article the distinction between the two candidates— not just on race, but on the directly related issue of how they view power and service. Guinier says that Clinton is “always the talented lawyer serving her clients.” Obama, though, is the organizer “who sees the source of his power as the ability to inspire people to mobilize.” On some essential level, Obama sees the power in the people, of which he considers himself one. On some essential level, Clinton sees power as a thing owned by the elite, one that comes with a responsibility to help people who can’t help themselves. There’s no question where she sees herself in that equation.

Boomers can’t seem to understand what Obama means when he says he’s not as invested as Clinton in the battles of the sixties. I think he’s in part speaking of a mindset. Hillary has made a tremendous mental journey. She has done great work. But times have changed. We can do better. We have an opportunity to turn the page and begin a new chapter in the history of U.S. race relations and power. This is the hip-hop generation. To speak in Clinton’s terms: why elect another Johnson when we have the option to elect a King?