If you think it was the dirtiest election in U.S. history, you’d be wrong.

ABC news put together a string of news clips Tuesday night showing news anchors dating back to Harry Reasoner declaring the election they had just covered the “dirtiest ever.”

History clearly records that politicians dating back to our sainted founders could sling the mud even more viciously than today’s pols.

When money and power are at stake, it’s never pretty.

ABC News also asked a series of voters Tuesday what they expect of their newly elected leaders.

Voter after voter said they wanted politicians to work together, get along and be civil with each other.

That’s hard to see coming when a liberal blowout is followed two years later by a conservative blowout.

It is even harder to picture after last year’s Supreme Court decision granting unions and corporations unprecedented ability to contribute the money used for negative ads and to cover their tracks.

Who actually paid for that negative ad? You may now never know.

Will we be happier than we are now with Congress and the president? We can hope, but election after election finds us voting for leaders who promise us jobs and change but who eventually fail us.

Some research suggests that we tend to plant the seeds of our own disappointment. Our expectations of elected leaders actually rise while they are in office. Even if things improve, we think things should be better.

Then there’s the loyal opposition. Whichever party is out of power spends the two years between election cycles tearing the other party down.

Congressional Republicans are said to actually like President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” education plan, yet you would be hard-pressed to find a news clip of them praising anything Obama has done.

And it’s not just the economy, as we often believe. Bill Clinton enjoyed a booming economy and was cutting the deficit, yet was under constant attack during his two terms in office.

Meanwhile, you heard nary a Republican complain while President George W. Bush was running up the deficit.

What’s more, newly elected tea party candidates will likely run into the reality of a Democratic presidency.

They may stop the Obama legislative train, but they will have a very tough time reversing the initiatives passed over the past two years or in passing their own.

In Maine, the challenge will be similar. The next governor will roll into Augusta having promised more jobs, lower taxes and reduced welfare rolls.

And that’s all before staring down a likely $800 million biennial budget shortfall.

Talk about expectations.

Yet, as they say, the people have spoken, and they have spoken clearly — we want less government and reduced governmental costs at all layers.

The challenge, of course, is that people always want those things until they learn what they have to give up to get them.

The lion’s share of Maine’s budget goes three places — municipal revenue sharing, education and human services.

Try cutting any of those and the fur will really begin to fly, particularly after two years of heavy budget cutting.

We will soon see whether the new governor and Legislature have the mettle to make those cuts and, we hope, keep us happy.