BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

“Do you ever get the feeling that the whole world is a tuxedo and you are a pair of brown shoes?”

That was comedian George Gobel’s quip after he was upstaged during  a 1969 Johnny Carson Show by the unscheduled appearances of Dean Martin and Bob Hope.

Forty years later the whole country is a tuxedo and Washington is a pair of brown shoes–out of step, out of fashion, out of vogue and out of touch with the realities of governing the country.

The whole fiscal cliff episode reminded me of Gobel’s sad situation.

The sole purpose of the fiscal cliff exercise was to put us on a path toward a balanced budget, by reducing the deficit and the total debt. While it avoided some costly tax increases for 98 percent of taxpayers and headed off a negative reaction in the marketplace, the fiscal cliff solution contributed damn little to reducing the deficit or the debt, both of which still stand as ominous threats to our economy and the lives of millions of Americans.

The last-minute resolution demonstrated an excruciating inability or unwillingness to govern on the part of the President, the Majority Leader of the Senate, and a number of House Republicans. The one leader who demonstrated the guts to govern was Speaker John Boehner. He did the impossible for two long years, ruling an unruly majority and then, when out of options, he put taxes and his own reputation on the negotiating table. Like a quarterback knowing he’s going to take a hit, he stayed in the pocket and held his ground.

What that portends for the future is unnerving. Our leaders left unresolved most of the tough issues. It took no courage to prevent tax increases for most taxpayers or to levy higher taxes on the rich. Yet you would have thought our fearless leaders were fighting an inter-galactic war, King Kong, two tsunamis, and the black plague, all at once.

It will take a great deal of courage, however, to deal with increasing the debt ceiling next month, and $500 billion in automatic spending cuts the next month, and the expiration of funding for the entire government that same month, and the statutory requirement that a budget be approved the month after that.

That’s what’s ahead just this spring. The President and Congress must also come to terms with real threats to our cyber-security. They must face up to reauthorizing our agriculture programs, including food stamps, which was done only temporarily in December. We’ve got looming crises with our transportation infrastructure, our lack of energy policy, and, of course, the estimated 14 million illegal immigrants in this country. Did I mention 13 million more Americans who remain unemployed or underemployed? And guns?

The fiscal cliff was a mole hill. There are mountains yet to climb and what 2011-2012 taught us was the leaders we’ve elected to scale the cliffs are not up to the task. True to form, they will buckle up and then buckle under.

Also not up to the task, and contributing nothing to the cause of good government and resolution of our national problems, is the media, new and old, print, broadcast and Internet. The media have rendered themselves irrelevant. But I digress.

The problems with the Senate and the House are transparent.

The Senate has plenty of political posturing, but what the majority lacks is governing leadership. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was so desperate in December he had to call Vice President Joe Biden in the 11th hour and ask him to come to the Hill and negotiate with him on a fiscal cliff solution. Majority Leader Harry Reid, consistent with his behavior in the 112th Congress, apparently just called it a night and went home in a pique.

The House continues to be sabotaged by a contingent of House Republicans who can’t decide whether they are libertarian anarchists or conservative consensus builders. They make no distinction between campaigning and governing. They are in denial about the outcome of the election and make some mind-bending excuses for it. They seem content to indulge their political purity rather than make public policy, confusing principles with process along the way. They believe that advocating no government somehow translates into limited government. It does not.

The real perplexing figure, however, is President Barack Obama. Who is this man and what does he want?

Throughout his presidency he has seemed more focused on a progressive agenda and a campaign thematic than the problems at hand.

Much of his first term was devoted to health care, energy and the environment and empowering his office through executive orders and regulatory expansionism. He cavalierly torpedoed the rare opportunity to reach a grand fiscal bargain in 2011, which would have gone a long way toward restoring the economy and rescuing millions of unemployed. Instead of keeping the focus on the economy, he squandered much of the rest of his term conditioning the political environment for more progressivism, promoting the redistribution of wealth and his socialist version of fairness.  That campaign theme devolved into the sum and substance of his fiscal cliff resolution, taxing families with more than $400,000 in income, more a vignette than a vision, and no deficit solution at all.

The President’s negotiations with Speaker Boehner were a repeat of the 2011 fiasco. Summaries and analyses of the post-election negotiations demonstrated clearly that the President did not negotiate in good faith. He showed that he either does not know how to negotiate in a difficult and complex environment or his head is so filled with fanciful illusions about his power and political popularity that he did not feel the necessity to negotiate at all. He, too, like some House Republicans, doesn’t seem to make any distinction or understand the differences between campaigning and governing because to this day, the Obama re-election campaign has not ended; it has simply been grafted onto his presidency. And, like the libertarian Republicans, with whom he has much in common, the President remains a devotee of political purity rather than sound public policy.

How else do you explain a President who says the government doesn’t have a spending problem and still more tax increases are needed to reduce the deficit?

How do you explain a President who said as recently as a month ago in Michigan that taxing the rich would solve our deficit issues? How else do you explain a President whose policy positions are driven by their public popularity?

The President is making his own job tougher, more difficult for him to lead the nation through some profoundly difficult problems, but he seems ambivalent.  He just keeps digging the hole deeper. He just keeps making enemies among those with whom he will have to work if he wants to govern.

It ‘s too bad. He will have sufficient strength in Congress for a brief time to conceivably fashion bipartisan consensus on a number of issues, but that won’t happen if he persists in being as rigidly dogmatic and defiant just like some of his counterparts on the far right.

Meanwhile, the problems mount and the senseless suffering continues and the tuxedo is so tattered, the shoes don’t matter anymore.

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.