Over the past eight years, it seems that George W. Bush has trashed virtually everything he has touched: the U.S. economy, the national debt, America’s standing in the world, the situation of the American military, the Justice Department, the Constitution.

The news that the list now includes the Republican Party is only mild consolation.

Tuesday, voters not only removed Bush’s Republicans from the White House, but rolled them back in Congress to pre-1994 levels, back before the South became a GOP stronghold, back before 1994 and 2004 were supposed to point the way to a lasting Republican majority. The reasons are not hidden.

As Tom Slade, former GOP chairman in Florida – the state that made George W. Bush president – told The New York Times, “We have done a miserable job in managing the affairs of government.”

According to CBS on Monday, Bush has an approval rating of 20 percent, the lowest any president has ever reached. According to both CBS and NBC polls, just 11 percent of Americans now think the United States is on the right track.

The day before the election, CNN ran a headline, “Where is W?” Everybody knew where the president was, and that there was no Republican candidate, however loyal or statistically safe, who wanted to appear in public with him.

The history books will list Barack Obama as the winner in this election, and John McCain as the loser. Certainly Obama is a charismatic figure who ran a brilliant campaign, and people will wonder for years just what made McCain pick Sarah Palin, and then decide to run as Herbert Hoover – harrumphing about socialism and redistribution of wealth at a time when most Americans were desperately concerned about their wealth’s utter disappearance.

But this election was about George W. Bush and the last eight years. And to the incoming Democrats, coming into power with a greater mandate and bigger congressional majorities than Bush could ever boast in 2000 or 2004, that reality provides not only an opportunity but a set of warnings.

Don’t go into major foreign military expeditions with only a hope that things will work out. Don’t set up a series of brutal foreign prisons that leave your country open to contempt around the world. Don’t regard the Constitution as something rendered outdated by a morning’s headlines.

Don’t take an election victory as such a ringing endorsement that you call Congress into special session to override courts and intervene in a family’s pain. When a major American city is drowned, don’t treat it as a matter of passing interest and then congratulate yourself on how well you’re dealing with it.

Don’t treat the economy as a testing ground of your ideology, rather than as something to be piloted, like a ship, from the visible signs all around you.

Most of all, and in all situations, don’t regard your critics as deserving of suspicion and investigation rather than a closer hearing.

Barack Obama not only succeeds Bush, he was elected largely as the anti-Bush. Aside from the obvious differences, the contrasts go on indefinitely: where Bush is instinctive (a generous word), Obama is thoughtful; where Bush is inarticulate, Obama is eloquent; where Bush is superficial, Obama is analytical; where Bush has marginalized dissenters, Obama is inclusive; where Bush disdains the rest of the world, Obama hears it.

From Election Day 2008, it’s hard even to call back the time of election 2000, when people actually imagined that the key trait for a president was to be someone you could hang with, not someone who would bore you with details. We have painfully come into a new world now; as a Pennsylvania bowler told The New York Times, referring to Palin’s “Average Joe” theme, “Average me! I don’t want someone like me in the Oval Office. I want somebody smarter.”

For years – and by some voices this fall – we were told such thinking was “elitist.” Now, to most Americans, it seems like simple survival.

Influenced from both sides – from Bush’s failure and from Obama’s appeal – American voters have gone through a process familiar to generations of twentysomethings:

They’ve decided they don’t want somebody to share a beer with.

They want somebody who can build a future.

David Sarasohn is an associate editor at The Oregonian of Portland, Ore. E-mail [email protected].