After Hope and Change: The Meme

The title of our book, After Hope and Change, anticipated a media meme that has been spreading.  Some recent examples:

• Paul Peterson, on disturbing data about minority education:  "Some might argue that this comparison is unfair to the Obama administration, as the 1999-2008 data cover nine years, while Mr. Obama had only four years to bring hope and change to American schools."
• Michael Boyle in The Guardian: "That short-sightedness, and the insincerity which has clothed so much of what he does in aspirational language of hope and change, will ultimately make his counterterrorism polices as disastrous as the ones he inherited."
• Kevin Williamson in National Review: "IPAB is the most dramatic example of President Obama’s approach to government by expert decree, but much of the rest of his domestic program, from the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law to his economic agenda, is substantially similar. In total, it amounts to that fundamental transformation of American society that President Obama promised as a candidate: but instead of the new birth of hope and change, it is the transformation of a constitutional republic operating under laws passed by democratically accountable legislators into a servile nation under the management of an unaccountable administrative state."
• George Ochenski in The Missoulian: "Back when candidate Barack Obama was campaigning for his first presidential bid, he spent a lot of time promising the American people that, were we to elect him, he would bring “hope and change” to the White House. The obvious reference was to then-President George W. Bush, of whom the citizens had grown exceedingly weary, not just because of his stupid and unnecessary wars, but for the `lying and spying' which came to be the trademark of the Bush-Cheney administration."
• Rand Paul on the Senate floor: The President promised us hope and change, but the more he claims that things change, I think the more they stay the same ... But hope and change just turned out to be a slogan. In Detroit and Chicago and in the once great cities of America, no change came. Hope and change was just a slogan. The poverty, the murders, the abysmal schools, they continue. Where are you, Mr. President? Where are you when in our hour of need in our country, why are you sending our money to people who hate us?