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EVERYONE FROM President Bush to pundits of the left, right and center have acknowledged that last week’s election results show that voters wanted change. So why have Democrats and Republicans in Congress apparently adopted as their theme the Who’s famous line: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”?

On Wednesday, Senate Republicans went back to the future to choose Trent Lott of Mississippi as the soon-to-be minority whip, the No. 2 Republican in the chamber after Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Yes, the same Trent Lott who had to resign as majority leader four years ago after proclaiming that if the rest of the country had followed Mississippi’s lead in voting for segregationist Strom Thurmond for president in 1948, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.”

And yes, the Republicans are doing this in the “year of the macaca.” One of the reasons they will soon find themselves in the minority, you will recall, was Confederate aficionado and Virginia Sen. George Allen’s use of the loaded term “macaca” to describe a minority staffer from his opponent’s campaign.

Lott, for his part, might have survived his tasteless tribute to Thurmond, offered at the former Dixiecrat’s 100th birthday, if he didn’t already have a credibility problem on issues of race. For example, when the Internal Revenue Service moved in 1981 to yank the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because it prohibited interracial dating, Lott defended the school’s position on religious freedom grounds. Other than the posthumous election of Thurmond as minority leader, it’s hard to imagine a worse signal for the Republican Party to send minorities.

Democrats tempted to gloat over Lott’s semi-comeback have their own “back to the future” problem. Today, the incoming majority in the House will choose its majority leader, the No. 2 Democrat in the chamber, and Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) has endorsed Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) for the position over Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), the current Democratic whip.

The 74-year-old Murtha is an old hand in the sort of politics that voters supposedly rebelled against last week. Americans with a short memory think of Murtha as the longtime hawk turned critic of U.S. involvement in Iraq. But long before he began to channel the U.S. military’s complaints about the Iraq war, Murtha was known as the consummate Washington insider.

He is an avid supporter of the special-interest appropriations known as “earmarking,” which are central to the “culture of corruption” that Democrats railed against in the recent campaign. Also, as Times reporters Janet Hook and Richard Simon noted this week, in the 1980s, Murtha was investigated in connection with the Abscam bribery scandal, in which FBI agents posing as wealthy Arab sheiks tested the rectitude of members of Congress. He was cleared of wrongdoing, but his videotaped behavior -- “I am not interested, at this point,” he said when offered a bribe -- proved highly embarrassing.

Murtha’s history would seem to belie Pelosi’s call for “the most honest, the most open and the most ethical Congress in history.” But like the Republicans in the Senate, the new speaker seems willing to go only so far in satisfying the voters’ appetite for change. If that disappointing pattern persists, Americans who thought they voted for change might echo the title of the Who classic we quoted above: “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”