Voters, however, were starved for the fairy tale. For many, the line in an Obama ad rang true: “Hillary Clinton. She’ll say anything and change nothing. It’s time to turn the page.”

Evidently, President Obama folded the corner of that page over so he could go back to it later. Remarkably, he bought us our return ticket to the past, rolling out the red carpet for the restoration of the Clinton blurred-lines White House.

An army of idealistic young people had moved to Iowa in 2007 to help Obama beat seemingly impossible odds. But in this election, Bernie Sanders’s idealistic young people were cast as unrealistic dreamers who wanted free stuff or, according to Gloria Steinem, dates.

The same Obama who sparked a revolution has now made it his mission to preserve the establishment for Hillary. He told Rutgers’s school paper in May that Sanders supporters needed to stop searching for silver bullets and recognize “we have to make incremental changes where we can, and every once in a while you’ll get a breakthrough and make the kind of big changes that are necessary.”

Yes we can — incrementally!

The president passed the baton to Hillary, as he puts it, more than three years ago, feeling she’s the safest bet to protect his legacy. As Politico’s Glenn Thrush reports, Obama wants to create what he calls “a 16-year era of progressive rule” and refocus American politics as the “Reagan of the left,” as one of his advisers put it.

Showing his icy pragmatism, the president passed over his loyal vice president because he thought Joe Biden would not be as strong a candidate, given his tendency for gab and gaffes. (That was before Donald Trump made Biden seem exquisitely bridled.) When Biden didn’t take the hint, Obama sent his former strategist David Plouffe to break the bad news.