The accursed power which stands on Privilege

(And goes with Women, and Champagne, and Bridge)

Broke— And Democracy resumed her reign

(Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne).

Some of Barack Obama’s more idealistic supporters might have been feeling as Hilaire Belloc did when he penned his famously acerbic observations on the outcome of the 1906 British General Election.

Change, they were promised, repeatedly, in the election campaign that ended this month in a famous victory for their man. But as details of the next president’s team continued to seep out yesterday it was getting harder and harder to tell what exactly would be changing when he takes office on January 20.

The news that Robert Gates, President Bush’s defense secretary for the last two years would be staying on at the Pentagon was the most remarkable example yet of a signalled continuity in foreign policy. Senator Obama won the Democratic party’s presidential nomination, and with it, the presidency, in large part because he articulated so well the widespread opposition in Democratic circles to the Iraq war and the desire among many Americans to disengage from Iraq. Mr Gates, a Republican, has been running that war for the last two years.

To be fair, the defense secretary was never known to be an enthusiastic supporter of the war. He was certainly known to have grave doubts – as did Mr Obama – about the surge of US forces that President Bush ordered two years ago as Mr Gates was taking office. And Obama team members made it clear yesterday that Mr Gates was expected to stay only as a sort of extended transition – for a year or two.

But even so, for a candidate who promised change this looks like the kind of compromise with the status quo that few could have been expecting.

Most striking is how the Obama team – the men and women, many of them idealistic believers in a fundamental change in direction, who have been with him from the start of his insurgent campaign – have ended up with lesser posts (or, so far, none at all) in the new administration. Instead the big, familiar beasts of the US political and foreign policy establishment seem to be in charge.

The three main members of Mr Obama’s national security team will be Mr Gates, the Republican, Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, who ran against the president-elect in the primaries and attacked him for his lack of experience and his naivete in foreign affairs; and, it seems increasingly likely, James Jones as national security adviser, a marine general and former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, a man whose closest political affiliation is probably with John McCain, the defeated Republican candidate, and who is also somewhat closer to Senator Clinton than to Mr Obama.

This embrace of continuity, or at least , conventional, mainstream thinking, is further emphasised by the choice announced on Monday of Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary. Mr Geithner is a gifted technocrat who just happens to be one of the three men (the others are Henry Paulson, the Treasury Secretary and Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman) who have driven the US government’s policy response to the global financial crisis for the last year .

What does all this continuity mean? Some Obama supporters worry that it represents a loss of nerve by the young president-elect. In the midst of the worst conditions facing an incoming president in at least 28 years he has opted for caution and continuity rather than trusting his instincts and going for something new.

But others say it shows how confident he is. It takes a certain amount of self-belief to surround yourself with people who have been steeped in the policies you have been criticising for so long. What’s more, his supporters point out, it is he, not his advisers, who will be setting the course for US policy in all these fields.

And as Belloc found out 100 years ago, the Liberal government he was so sneering about turned out to be pretty radical after all, despite its personnel.

Still, the formation of the first Obama Cabinet suggests that, in America, the Change We Can Believe In may turn out to be Not Quite As Much Change As We Were Expecting.

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