Lipstick this pig any way you wish. It was a disaster.

Georgia really does need to look beyond the current leadership under the Gold Dome. It's dysfunctional. It's the Clayton County Board of Education writ large.

The disconnect is at the top. The governor. The lieutenant governor. The speaker.

It's not amusing anymore.

It's not simply that they don't get along. With some notable exceptions —- education notably among them —- they don't deliver. And when they do, it's often because there's an army of high-priced lobbyists working both chambers and both sides of the aisle.

Take, for example, the crisis that required immediate legislative attention: The decision by the Georgia Supreme Court that the money we pay to educate children can't be handed over to developers for other purposes.

For homeowners, the Supreme Court's decision could be considered a good thing. When a development results in more children in public schools, somebody has to pay. If the taxes paid by the parents of those children are diverted to developers for other purposes, it's taxpayers outside those tax allocation districts who foot the bills.

That unanimous court decision on Feb. 11 prompted an immediate declaration from Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle that the decision "has threatened a critical infrastructure and economic development tool for Georgia and we must act and develop a solution."

Sure enough, on the final day of this year's General Assembly —- while neither Cagle nor House Speaker Glenn Richardson could agree on tax relief for working Georgians or for the 93 percent of households owning cars and trucks —- the "crisis" wrought by a perfectly reasonable Supreme Court decision got resolved.

Georgians were given a chance to decide in November whether to change the state Constitution so that the money taxed to support schools can be given to developers. Why? Because developers and lawyers who get rich processing public debt lobbied heavily to give you that chance.

Some crisis.

One of the other pieces of business that got through in the final hours —- relaxing small portions of the state's archaic certificate of need regulation —- represents a significant step in the necessary dismantling of this failed '70s-era attempt to contain health care inflation. But it is maddening that the dispute is fought not in the context of any particular vision for reducing the market-distorting presence of government regulators in the health care industry, but because two well-funded adversaries (doctors and hospitals) brought their dispute to the Legislature.

In that sense, nothing changes. In large measure lobbyists set the agenda.

On transportation, for instance, an invitation to Georgians to vote ourselves a one-cent increase in the motor fuel tax is an example of what happens when legislators and interest groups perceive a gubernatorial leadership void. Some 50 groups, ranging from the Southern Environmental Law Center to those that profit from public spending, banded together to push legislators to "do something."

The "something," which fell three votes shy in the waning minutes of this year's session, would have committed the state to a course of action that the governor opposed. It would, furthermore, have policy implications that got lost in the do-a-deal frenzy. Nobody knows, for example, whether the state's needs are a penny or 10 pennies, and what role the private sector will play. Nor is there a statewide transportation plan with objectives that this approach would advance.

The waste of opportunities is all the more regrettable because the House and Senate are filled with energetic, creative and competent legislators who want to do something meaningful. Absent leadership and a uniting vision, they busy themselves tending the agendas of lobbyists.

It's not that I want comity at the top. Worse than the squabbles that lead to nothing would be relationships in one-party government that allowed a handful of top leaders to go behind closed doors and agree on which laws to pass. Institutional tension is not the problem. Changing one personality is not the solution.

Anybody know what the leaders are trying to do with this government? I don't.

> Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays. His Thinking Right blog appears daily.

jwooten@ajc.com