Barack Obama and Mitch McConnell have wholly incompatible notions of American governance.
It may be why the President came out of the merciless fight over the U.S government's debt limit looking depleted, while the Republican Senate Minority Leader only seemed to be begging for more.
"It shouldn't take the risk of default - the risk of economic catastrophe - to get folks in this town to work together and do their jobs," Mr. Obama said on Tuesday, after the Senate voted 74- 26 to lift the $14.3-trillion (U.S.) debt ceiling by as much as $2.4-trillion.
Contrast the President's lament about a "dysfunctional" government that is only able to "focus when there's a timer ticking down" with Mr. McConnell's view of American sausage-making as a work of art.
"The push and pull Americans saw in Washington these past few weeks was not gridlock," the 69-year-old Kentucky lawyer insisted on the Senate floor just before the vote. "It was the will of the people working itself out in a political system that was never meant to be pretty."
He's right. American politics is no place for sensible shoes. Winkleboots are more like it.
Mr. Obama is not the pushover those in the "professional left" seem to think he is after abandoning his demand for tax increases in the deficit-reduction package the GOP had sought in exchange for allowing the government to borrow more.
But temperamentally, Mr. Obama is different from most of the political class in Washington, Democrats and Republicans alike. They thrive on conflict; he avoids it like the plague. That may make the President "the adult in the room." It may not make him a good negotiator or strategist.
When dozens of Tea Partiers were elected in last fall's midterm elections, he should have sought a debt-limit increase before they took their seats in January.
During the so-called lame duck session of last December, Republicans had only the threat of a Senate filibuster, not control of the House of Representatives. Mr. Obama could have offered to extend Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy then, in exchange for an increase in the debt limit by an amount large enough to get him past the 2012 election.
Instead, the administration agreed to prolong the Bush-era rates for two years in exchange for a mini-stimulus package consisting of extended unemployment benefits and a payroll tax cut. Neither constituted much of a concession on the GOP's part. After all, the party exists to cut taxes.
The other mistake was to assume that House Speaker John Boehner would cut loose his rambunctious freshmen to push through a debt-ceiling increase with more Democratic votes than Republican ones.
The White House was right to think that Mr. Boehner, an old-school Republican, would never have allowed the country to default. But it was wrong to think he could never get his 87 freshmen members to compromise.
In fact, the debt-ceiling bill Mr. Boehner was finally able to pass last Friday with Republican-only support represented a huge compromise on the part of the Tea Partiers who voted for it. It forced the White House to move in Mr. Boehner's direction.
Mr. McConnell played the mediator in the climactic weekend talks between Mr. Boehner and Vice-President Joe Biden. It was no surprise to anyone in Washington that it took two old Senate hands to end the impasse.
Once again, Mr. Biden, who spent 36 years in the upper chamber, showed why he is so indispensable to Mr. Obama. He knows how the other side thinks because he thinks like the other side. They're culturally identical.
Mr. Biden knew what Mr. Obama needed - a debt ceiling increase to get him past election day - and he knew what he needed to do to get it.
The GOP "victory" - a $2.4-trillion deficit reduction package, without new taxes for now - may be more imaginary than real. Almost all of the "cuts" are back-end loaded over 10 years and may never occur. As former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers noted in the Financial Times: "The current Congress cannot effectively constrain future actions."
Contrary to the GOP narrative, Republicans have not dragged Mr. Obama "kicking and screaming" into an age of austerity.
But in Washington, looking like you've won may be just as important as winning.
Konrad Yakabuski