university as Chicago. These are the protective guard-dogs of America's vested interests," said Hudson.

More mouldy cabbages are being hurled at Obama's picks at the Pentagon, starting with the familiar visage of Robert Gates, already in occupation of the top job having been put there by George Bush Jr to replace Donald Rumsfeld. Winslow Wheeler, for many years a senor Republican staffer in Congress, has a solid reputation as one of the best-informed of all the observers of that vast sinkhole of fraud and waste, the US Defence Department.

During Gates' tenure, Wheeler complains, "things have only gotten worse. What about Obama’s National Security Advisor, former US Marine General Jim Jones? He is a man of great stature, physically and figuratively, in Washington," Wheeler says tartly. "He is a Washington 'heavy' but if you look at his record, nothing much ever happened. Things went south in Afghanistan pretty rapidly when he was Supreme Commander of all Nato forces in Afghanistan. When he was Commandant of the Marine Corps, a lot of the marines' over-priced, under-performing hardware programmes were endorsed and continued happily along. He seems to have been mostly a place-holder when he had these very senior and important positions."

One striking feature of these complaints is that if the complainers had their suspicions about Obama during the campaign, they kept their mouths firmly shut. Across eight presidential campaigns, since Jimmy Carter's successful run in 1976, I've never seen such collective determination by the liberal left to think only positive thoughts about a Democratic candidate. Indeed, some of the present fury may stem from a certain embarrassment at their own political naivety.

In fairness to Obama, beyond the vaguely radical afflatus of his campaign rhetoric about "change", he never concealed his true political stance, which is of the centre-right. In every sense of the phrase, he can say to his left critics, "I told you so." Indeed he did.

In his salvoes against Obama's economic team, Michael Hudson brought up one ominous parallel. Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, after eight years of Richard Nixon. The hopes of the liberal left were similarly high. Almost immediately Carter dashed their hopes with hawkish foreign policy appointments.

Two years after Carter took over the Oval Office, I interviewed William Winpisinger, president of the Machinists' Union and one of the most powerful labour leaders

in America. I put a tape recorder on his desk and asked, "Is there anything President Carter could do to redeem himself in your eyes?" Winpsisinger eyed the tape recorder bleakly and said, "Die."

A year later Carter was grimly fighting a liberal-left challenge to his re-nomination by the Democrats for a second term. The challenger was Teddy Kennedy. Though Carter beat back the Kennedy threat, he was seriously weakened and lost his re-election bid.

One can surmise that one reason Obama has made Hillary Clinton Secretary of State is to head off a Kennedy-type challenge. But if things go badly wrong in the eyes of the liberal left, Obama can expect political trouble in the not-too-distant future. The trouble with slogans like 'change' is that they are like zeppelins. The wind can whistle out of their pretensions with lethal speed.