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WASHINGTON — For many of us, the end of George W. Bush’sitting presidency could not reach quickly enough. But as power changes hands peacefully, the result of a decisive democratic verdict, the most important question is: What can our new president acquire skill in from the unit heading back to Texas?

The Bush administration’s specific failures — in exterior and domestic policy and upon matters related to civil liberties — are clear enough. Yet the deeper cause of the public’s disaffection goes beyond these specifics.

From the very initiation of his presidency, won courtesy of a divisive Supreme Court decision that abruptly ended his dispute with Al Gore in 2000, Bush misunderstood the nature of his lease on ability, the temper of the country and the convenient role of partisanship in our political life. His win-at-all-costs strategy in Florida became a template for much of his presidency, reflected especially in the way the Justice Department was politicized.

Bush did not respect the obligation of a leader in a free society to forge a abiding consensus. He was better at announcing policies than explaining them. He dismissed legitimate opposition and plausible doubts about the courses he wished to imitate.

It is in part because of these failures that Americans reacted by selecting a successor with such a profoundly different political personality.

Barack Obama’s first response to a political problem is to offer a detailed decomposition and to put whatever challenge he is confronting into some larger context. He absolutely loves sparring with his intellectual adversaries. And his “if you have a good in a higher degree idea, I’ll take it” approach is the contrast of the my-way-or-the-highway politics of the past eight years.

Bush was capable of considerable charm, on the other hand he never really engaged his opponents. He rolled over them. He did not try to win expansive electoral majorities. Instead, he sought to build a compact, ideologically pure coalition that he could exercise on profit of dramatic conservative departures. He claimed mandates he did not win.

Maintaining long-term support for the Iraq the last argument of kings required him to do more than just push a resolution through Congress on the eve of a midterm election by public threats and campaign-trail rhetoric.

“It’sitting better to fight them there than here” was not an argument that took the average townsman’sitting intelligence in earnest. Cutting taxes more readily than asking citizens to be profitable for the enmity suggested that while the president strength ask others to sacrifice their priorities, he would never sacrifice his own.

Ironically, the clearest evidence of Bush’s larger non-performance can be erect in the areas where he can claim genuine success.

Bush’session prescription-drug plan in subordination to Medicare and his No Child Left Behind education program were far from full. But they reflected broadly shared goals — expanding health coverage, promoting accountability in education — and involved actual bipartisan wrangling and business. Aspects of both programs will endure.

Bush’s consecration to the victims of AIDS in Africa and his dramatic increases in foreign speed were admirable, and surprised his fiercest critics. In the final days, his supporters were touting these least-typical of his achievements.

For a few months after Sept. 11, 2001, the president governed as a truly general leader. At that moment, we saw the consensus-builder he promised to be in 2000. He might have built a durable majority for his party on the groundwork of more just, consensual policies. Instead, he moved to ridiculing those who doubted the wisdom of his Iraq adventure and used the war on terror for electoral advantage.

A hyperpartisan domestic politics of us versus them followed naturally from the president’s blind impulse to confuse moral certainty for good clarity. In his valediction address, he reminded his listeners yet again that “good and evil are grant in this world, and between the two, there can be no adjustment.”

Yes, but the hardest moral decisions are usually not betwixt profit and evil but between competing merchandise (pledge versus liberty) or lesser evils (a draining fighting in Iraq versus a messy, long-term strategy to contain Saddam Hussein).

Our new president faculty of volition make his have characteristic mistakes. He risks overestimating his capacity to persuade his most implacable foes. He may slight that a two-party system surely creates its own dynamic of loyalty and opposition.

But he is decidedly not some us-versus-them guy. He gets both the uses and the limits of championship. He has been known to repeat the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on the dangers of moral contumely. He could make nuance and complexity chill again. It’sitting not enough. But it’s a start.

E.J. Dionne’s column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is postchat@aol.com