In his acceptance speech last Tuesday, President Elect Barack Obama said boldly, "It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America."

Change has been the slogan of the Obama-Biden campaign (the newly launched 'Office of the President Elect' has the URL change.gov), so the use of the word bears further reflection.

It was the natural campaign slogan for Obama to choose. The American public has long been deeply weary of the Bush presidency (one recent poll giving the incumbent a minus 52% approval rating). The two men could not be more different, even aside from the political divide: Bush is from the south, Obama from the north; Bush had developed a reputation for anti-intellectualism, Obama was a university lecturer; Obama is 48, George Bush is 62, and the difference between the two is greater than a mere 14 years – definitively, Obama is from the generation where a black man could ascend to the highest office in the Western world. Just by being elected, Obama has embodied social change.

This is not the same as saying Obama has created change. When it comes to policy solutions for the hard political issues, 'change' alone isn't enough, and different does not necessarily mean better. Anyway, on many of the big issues – the banking crisis, for example – Obama's approach will essentially be the same as the current administration's. There are only so many options in play when the global financial system goes into near meltdown. So it was that McCain probably lost the election on a policy issue, in insisting that "The fundamentals of the economy are strong" and dithering where, ironically, Obama and Bush were both clear on the severity of the crisis and the need to recapitalise American banking institutions. This was the Republican challengers' seven word suicide note in an election where 60% of voters said the economy was the issue of most concern to them.

But this election will not be remembered for its policy debates. The change Obama has the chance to create, as opposed to merely symbolise, is essentially a change in the prevailing political culture. Bushes Senior and Junior, Clinton, Carter, Reagan and Nixon have been Presidents of a dis-United States: two nations, two psyches, always for or against this or that: abortion, gun control, capital punishment, Iraq war. Obama looks to avoid the polarities of the past. On the issue of faith in public life, for instance, he has spoken publically on the need for the integration of faith with public life while simultaneously defending the separation of church and state from a pro-faith perspective. As one commentator has put it, he's made it his business to scramble categories.

Paul Bickley is a Researcher at Theos.