Barack Obama rounds up the usual suspects

Two years without a single leak and suddenly, this week, Obama's operation is like a sieve. That's what happens when you pick up the phone and call one of the Clintons. Or, to put it another way, that's what happens when someone claims you, the president-elect, picked up the phone and called Mrs Clinton to ask whether she'd like to be secretary of state.

Out the window goes the sense of purposeful strides towards a new-look administration. In comes a dreadful feeling that somehow we've slipped a dimension in the space-time continuum and are heading back into the Clinton era. A couple of more weeks and the Republicans will be calling for a special prosecutor.

I've had people try to explain to me the political logic of Obama offering his erstwhile Democratic rival a top position in his cabinet. Better to have her inside the tent. Send her off on bouts of futile shuttle diplomacy, like Condoleezza Rice.

Mrs Clinton has never had any appetite to find out what is going on in the world.

It still doesn't add up. Why march back briskly into the earliest days of the Clinton administration? Mrs Clinton has never displayed any talent for negotiation, nor even any conspicuous appetite to find out what is going on in the world. She voted yes on the Iraq war. She was an ardent advocate of Nato's onslaught on Yugoslavia. If we do get Hillary at State we may get Madeleine Albright as one of her sidekicks - the woman who said in the late 1990s that starving half a million Iraqi children was "worth it", probably the line that the 9/11 al-Qaeda hijackers were muttering to themselves when they sped on their mission of revenge towards the Twin Towers. This is change?

The answer of course is that there has to be a good deal of similarity between the Clinton and Obama administrations, because the 45- and 50-year-old veterans of the two Clinton administrations who have been cooling their heels in law firms and think tanks for eight years make up a high percentage of those in the hiring line, particularly those who placed an early bet on Obama. The new White House counsel will be Gordon Craig, who defended Clinton during his impeachment.

The young people who worked for Obama and