As early as half past eight on Tuesday evening, Eastern Standard Time, only an hour and a half from the time the first polls closed, it became clear that the American political landscape had changed dramatically. The “very steep hill” that Republican candidate John McCain had to climb (the phrase is Karl Rove’s) had turned into a Himalayan peak. An hour after the Democratic Party held on to Pennsylvania, the only “blue” state McCain thought he had a chance of winning, the Republicans lost Ohio, and with it any hope of winning the most dramatic US general election in memory. The improbable victory of Barack Obama was assured.

Predicted, anticipated by all national polls since the middle of September—but still improbable. Obama, the son of a white American mother and a Kenyan father, became the first black man to win the White House. He did so resoundingly; his was not a victory like the fluke that benefited George W. Bush in 2000. Instead, Obama’s victory recalls the landslide triumphs of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, Richard Nixon in 1972 and Lyndon Johnson in 1964, a year after the Kennedy assassination. Like them, he won with solid coattails, reinforcing control of both the US Senate and the House of Representatives. And he became, since Jimmy Carter in 1976, the first Democrat to earn an outright majority of the popular vote. Unlike, say, George W. Bush in 2000.

There will be time, in the days and weeks ahead, to describe the extraordinarily disciplined campaign that Obama ran: how he and his campaign made the 2008 contest a true 50-state operation; how they generated over $600 million in campaign contributions, largely through the Internet; how they mobilized the largest crowds ever seen in an American political campaign; and, not least, how they deployed a million and a half volunteers in the last few days of the longest campaign in US history. There will be time for all that; for now, let us focus on the clear meaning of the 2008 election: It was a complete repudiation of the Bush administration.

It was a repudiation of President Bush’s performance. Bush squandered the $500-billion budget surplus he inherited; doubled the US national debt to $10 trillion; and presided over the worst financial crisis to hit the United States since the Great Depression.

It was a repudiation of Bush’s policies. Bush wasted the global good will the United States earned in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks; launched two wars (the first necessary but hurriedly neglected, the second contentious and seemingly endless); and all but declared war on American civil liberties.

It was, finally, a repudiation of Bush’s personal style of leadership: intellectually incurious, stubborn and impervious to even constructive criticism, quick to take offense and, not least, indulgently self-righteous.

It was a thorough repudiation, because Obama promises to be the opposite of all that. If the quality of Obama’s economic team is any indication, the United States (still the world’s largest economy) under his administration may prove to be as fiscally conservative as that of Bill Clinton. Obama’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq from the start promises an end (in something like a year and a half) to American occupation in that country and a refocusing on Afghanistan.

As for leadership, a Republican strategist acknowledged on one of those endless live-analysis segments on cable television seen not only in the United States but followed closely all over the world that Obama’s victory speech struck him in part because he told those who did not vote for him: “I need your help.”

Activist Joshua Levy, writing in TPMCafe, one of innumerable websites that documented the dramatic election, explained how he would tell his son the story of the 2008 election:

“I’ll remind him that we were emerging from one of the darkest periods in our country’s history, a period in which our nation had been attacked by terrorists, an act that, rather than uniting us, inspired our leaders to lie to us, to offer false comfort, and to enact grave misdeeds that endangered not only our own physical safety, but the future of our democracy.”

In voting for Obama, almost 60 million Americans voted to stop cursing the darkness and light a candle instead.