The hip President is gone. The man of our generation, the first baby-boomer to hold the highest office in the land. He was the President who admitted he smoked pot, the one who dodged the draft in Vietnam, the one who got caught cheating on his wife.

But he was also the one who graduated from Oxford, who loved policy discussions so much he would stay up exchanging ideas with his cronies until 3 a.m., the one so determined to sow a legacy of peace in faraway places that he focused a disproportionate amount of attention on a small place he grew to love called Ireland.

She is gone, too. The First Lady who was a lawyer and a political strategist - some said the best strategist in Washington. The First Lady who sneered at baking cookies and instead travelled across the Arab world studying the Koran in an attempt to understand Islam. In her place comes a new First Lady who says she is not "knowledgeable about issues".

Their supporters are gone, too - the star power that saw itself reflected in a modern, literate, perhaps even elite sensibility. No more Jack Nicholson at parties, no more Barbara Streisand singing for her supper. Now, Las Vegas singer Wayne Newton and Ricky Martin are providing the entertainment.

Gone also are Bill Clinton's cabinet and top advisers, from the dour but determined Janet Reno, who headed up the Justice Department and once wept publicly about the federal government's errors in a stand-off with religious cultists in Texas that ended up costing children's lives; to pint-sized Donna Shalala, who oversaw the dismantling of the public welfare system, yet did so in a fashion so compassionate that many critics were silenced.

The new president, George W. Bush, is nearly the same age as Mr Clinton but might as well be from another planet. He is routinely described by people who know him as smarter than he seems. But even those supporters concede he is intellectually "incurious" (one senses here a new buzz-word in the making).

During the campaign debates he was asked about the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalists who run Afghanistan and who also run, according to the CIA, the most efficient and deadly training camps for terrorists, whose activities are aimed largely at the US.

Looking befuddled, Mr Bush said he first thought the Taliban was a rock group, then added: "Oh, yes, the Taliban. Absolutely. Repressive."

Lest Americans shudder too much over a man whose experience in government amounts to six years as governor of a state with a part-time legislature, the Republican party establishment soon made it clear that "Shrub" - the name for Mr Bush coined by popular Texas writer Molly Ivins - was not on his own.

His vice-president would be Dick Cheney, one of the most experienced hands in Washington. A former five-term member of Congress, a White House chief of staff at age 34, a former secretary of defence, and, - perhaps most importantly - a good friend of George Bush snr, the father.

Both the comedy programmes and the most knowledgable pundits inside Washington tell us it is Dick Cheney who will really be running the country, assisted by the old hands who have returned from the exile they were forced into when Bush the father lost his re-election bid for the presidency in 1992.

Donald Rumsfield, back from his days in Richard Nixon's cabinet, also Mr Cheney's mentor, will run the Pentagon. Colin Powell, who served under Bush the father, will be secretary of state.

AND SO Washington is firmly back in the hands of the Republican old guard. Corporate America has certainly been the first to announce it is back; despite US prosperity, corporate America never felt comfortable with Mr Clinton, whose Justice Department helped sue tobacco companies, attacked Microsoft for antitrust violations, and generally kept corporations' feet to the fire.

General Motors was among the first to hold a lavish cocktail party for Mr Bush this week (Mr Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, was GM's chief lobbyist until last year). More than 45 corporations have written cheques for over $100,000 to help sponsor inaugural festivities, raising some $35 million in just 31 days.

Oil companies such as Texaco and BP Amoco, eager for the new president to change policies and allow them begin oil exploration in environmentally protected areas such as Alaska, have been big contributors. Pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer, which has operations in Ireland, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Abbott Labs, under pressure from the Clinton administration to lower prescription drug costs, have contributed at least $625,000 to sponsor parties.

What will the return of the old guard mean? In many ways, its foreign policy may be different from Bush the father's. Things have changed in eight years. Mr Bush's top advisers are among the most isolationist voices in the foreign policy establishment, opposing almost all the international agreements made in the last decade, including the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Kyoto protocol on global warming, and the International Criminal Court.

None of those advisers believes strongly in the UN, and they are even less supportive of UN peacekeeping missions. There is even much support in the Bush camp for abolishing the International Monetary Fund.

History and unplanned events, of course, have a way of establishing policy where none existed before, and it is possible that global economics and regional instabilities may cause a shift toward global engagement - or at least interest - that seems unlikely at this moment.

A veteran CNN reporter who has covered three presidencies, Candy Crowley, says that already she sees Mr Bush being "presidentialised". Perhaps. But one truth remains incontrovertible: our hip President is gone.