Maureen Dowd(CREDIT: The New York Times)

It wasn’t easy for Barack Obama, a skinny newcomer to national politics with an exotic name and scant résumé, to overthrow the voracious Clinton machine.

The 45-year-old had to turn himself into a dream catcher. He had to become an avatar of idealism and persuade Americans that he could take us to a political Arden beyond lies and vanishing records and money grabs.

“We need a leader who’s going to touch our souls,” Michelle told a South Carolina rally in 2007. “Who’s going to make us feel differently about one another.”

Obama was going to lift Washington to a higher plateau. The young senator from Chicago was going to prove the White House could be a gleaming citadel of integrity and ethics and exemplary family life.

Watching Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich go at it, Obama once wrote, “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the baby boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”

Making the case against Hillary, he said America deserved more than triangulating and poll-driven positions and “the same old Washington textbook campaign,” more than a candidate answering questions whatever way she thought would be popular and “trying to sound or vote like Republicans, when it comes to national security issues.”

Obama was not surrounded by the mercenary likes of David Brock and Dick Morris but true believers like David Axelrod.

The Clintons, infuriated by the raft of Democrats who deserted them during the 2008 campaign, sneered at Obama’s hope and change message. Hillary protested, “We don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country.” Bill groused, “This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.”

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’ young people were cast as unrealistic dreamers who wanted free stuff.

The same Obama who sparked a revolution has now made it his mission to preserve the establishment for Hillary. He told Rutgers’ 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.

Maybe Obama felt he owed Hillary, after leapfrogging over her to make history as a “first” — with the help of a lot of Democratic luminaries who publicly broke with the vindictive Clintons, only to find themselves having to spend the last couple years crawling back into their good graces.

The president made his vote-for-Hillary-or-face-doom convention speech only 22 days after his FBI director painted Hillary as reckless and untruthful.

He argued that there is no choice but to support Hillary against a “self-declared savior” like Donald Trump, perhaps forgetting that Obama was once hailed as such a messiah.

In the end, Obama didn’t overthrow the Clinton machine. He enabled it.

It turns out who we choose is not really about our souls. It’s just politics, man.

— Maureen Dowd is a columnist for The New York Times.