The conventional explanation for the Biden boomlet is discomfort over Hillary’s email mess. Democrats want a hedge in case the ice splits beneath her. That’s part of it. A more compelling explanation is that a lot of the Obama network wants to take back control of the Game they won eight years ago.

The 2008 presidential primaries reorganized power in the Democratic Party. In early 2007, when freshman Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and household-name Hillary Clinton announced for the presidency, the Clinton political machine owned the Democratic Party. Barack Obama was a virtual nobody.

During those primaries and the Obama campaign that defeated Sen. John McCain, a new Democratic galaxy emerged—donors, operatives, volunteers, wealthy people who outrigged new progressive media sites. This Democratic generation disdained the Clinton machine. When Barack Obama won, they won.

Now it’s as if all that ideology, innovation and effort has rolled down the mountain. They’re defaulting to the same Clinton machine they thought they’d defeated. Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, John Podesta, Sidney Blumenthal, Lanny Davis—some of these people have been around since the Travelgate scandal at the dawn of the Clinton presidency. For the people who’ve been running the Democratic Party the past seven years, it’s 1993 all over again.