BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

One of the failings of our system of governance, former Republican Leader Bob Michel once observed, is that you can no longer tell where the campaigns end and governing begins.

That trend has defined American politics for sometime. The differences between campaigning and governing have gotten less and less apparent. And this year, they seemed to have disappeared all together, after a brief flurry of off-again, on-again, off again, bipartisan, bicameral, bi-branch exchanges that showed promise, but no permanency.

The combatants in American politics, conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans, have dropped any pretense of governing. It is all campaigning, all the time. And no one did it in more grandly than the President.

Oregon Rep. Greg Walden said the other day that he has never seen a President step away from governing the way President Barack Obama has. Previous presidents who served in divided government where Republicans controlled one part and Democrats the other chose not to cut and run in the face of serious challenges. Ronald Reagan didn’t. Nor did George H.W. Bush or Bill Clinton. When the country’s challenges demanded it, they stepped up, not away. They found common ground, sorted through the politics and partisanship, made decisions and resolved contentious issues like taxes, Social Security, budgets and welfare reform.

When President Obama was asked on 60 Minutes:  “Isn’t it your job as president to find solutions to these problems, to get results, to figure out a way to get it done?”’ the response was pretty much no. The President said it was his job to present the country with a vision, presumably so others could govern.

Walden, a serious legislator and one good at governing, got it right. He said the American people asked for divided government in 2010, but they only got half of what they wanted. They got the division, but no government.

President Obama stepped away from his own Bowles-Simpson commission on debt reduction. In July, he stepped away from what would have been a historic agreement on the debt with House Speaker John Boehner. He abused the privilege afforded Presidents by turning a speech before a Joint Session of Congress into a partisan political campaign ad about job creation, from which no jobs were created. He stepped away from new opportunities to create jobs, such as the Keystone Pipeline, and he stepped way–took flight actually, out of the country–from the so-called super committee that at one point was a very close to resolution.

When he got back from his foreign travels, the deficit reduction committee members had frozen themselves in gridlock.  No movement. Nothing.  Zip. Nada. No solution. So he went on a campaign road trip, holding more fundraisers and visiting more swing states than any of his predecessors in a comparable period. Then it was on to Osawatomie, Kansas, the site of a defining speech by Teddy Roosevelt in 1910. Obama’s attempt to resurrect the ghost of Roosevelt was unsuccessful. There were no sightings. Good thing for Obama. Roosevelt went on to lose big.

The speech was vintage Obama, laced with soaring rhetoric, grand visions, glittering generalities, oversimplified solutions to our national crises and no specifics, except the extension of a payroll tax reduction. It was the Obama of 2008, the fresh young Senator from Illinois who captured the hearts and hopes of so many Americans. And if this were 2008, the speech would have been a great success. But this is 2012, or soon to be, and President Obama is no longer a candidate without a record, so the soaring rhetoric wasn’t believable. It wasn’t the beacon of hope with which he lit the sky four years ago. The orator found himself stymied by something stronger than his rhetoric—reality.

The President did, however, move the country closer and closer to the era of the perpetual campaign. We operate on governing cycles of two years, based on the two-year lifespan of each Congress. At the outset of a new Congress, the pundits speculate on how long the Congress and the President will have to get anything done before the pressures of electioneering overpower them. It used to be a little more than a year, before primary season; then it was reduced to a year, and then 9 months and then six. This year we barely made it to June before it all collapsed.

The conditions that have led us here were evolving in American politics long before Osawatomie. The seeds were growing when Obama was still a community organizer and Illinois State Senator. In Walden’s House of Representatives, it can be traced back to Speakers Jim Wright, Newt Gingrich, even the mild-mannered Denny Hastert, and other leaders such as Nancy Pelosi and Tom DeLay. It can be traced to a whole host of other events and circumstances that we, as a populace have allowed to corrode and corrupt our political system, ranging from gerrymandered political districts and the rise of hard-line political and ideologically rigid groups to news media trapped in their own misguided business models that require conflict and confrontation over information and  intellectual exchange.

The American electorate, for a variety of reasons, has been complicit, electing people to public office who only know how to campaign; people who know so little about governing and have so few governing skills and experience, they don’t even fake it well. Some could care less. The public has mistaken politics as something akin to the reality TV shows they watch. Only reality TV is not real. Ultimately, politics has to be.

The Congress, as a result, has been taken hostage by a minority who believe, as does the President, that they were sent to Washington to have visions–for a some they are more hallucinations than visions–to enunciate principles, to reverse the status quo and set the country on a new course, without actually doing it, without actually passing laws and establishing policies that result in the transformational changes they talk about.

Those members and the President himself may give voice to and reflect national emotions, but they don’t reflect nor do they fulfill the national will for government to act to make things better, to put the country back to work, to protect retirements, find new sources of energy, build roads and repair bridges, educate the young, ensure adequate health care, and make us secure in our future.

Their only mission now is to get re-elected, leaving the electorate with a conundrum. After all, how many mid-course corrections can the electorate make before the correction becomes the course and the electorate finds itself chasing its tail.

Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.