People of a certain age (22?) may remember a distinct feeling ofhopeback in 2008, when a certain candidate for president symbolized a hoped-for end to the pent-up anger, disappointment and disillusionment of the Bush Junior years, the reduced-expectations era of Kerry and Gore and (gah!) Lieberman and Edwards, the reliably chaotic economic bubbles and collapses, the terrorism and consumerism, the disastrous foreign wars, the economic injustice, the willful ignorance of the environmental disaster, the brazen crime spree of the elites, the death of the American Soul, etc.