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So it was that, in a single week in President Obama’s second February in office, everything basically broke down, or at least froze in place.

Tracking a chaotic couple of hours... A former president was hospitalized for a heart procedure... The Kennedy political dynasty moved toward a quiet close...

A blizzard sparked a climate debate... Health care reform waited out another week... Glimmers of bipartisanship were promptly extinguished in the Senate... And we filled our snow-stuffed days with visions of Sarah Palin and David Paterson and John Edwards...

This is Washington at its most dysfunctional -- leaving aside the monstrous snow piles cutting down on the parking spots.

The prospects of actual governance emerging in this environment have rarely seemed bleaker. And yet -- doesn’t someone have to be the grown-up around here?

A public that’s basically soured on everybody: “At a time of deepening political disaffection and intensified distress about the economy, President Obama enjoys an edge over Republicans in the battle for public support, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll,” Adam Nagourney and Megan Thee-Brenan report in the Times.

“The poll suggests that both parties face a toxic environment as [they] prepare to face voters in November,” they write. “The percentage of Americans who approve of Mr. Obama’s job performance, at 46 percent, is as low as it has been since he took office.”

Eight percent of respondents said they want members of Congress reelected. Eight.

You don’t have to go far to find the frustration: “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s increasingly public disagreements with President Barack Obama are a reflection of something deeper: the seething resentment some Democrats feel over what they see as cavalier treatment from a wounded White House,” Politico’s Mike Allen and Patrick O’Connor report. “Though Pelosi and other House Democrats have made it clear that they’re angry with the Senate, they’re also frustrated with the president, upset that he hasn’t come to terms with the problems of getting legislation through the upper chamber -- or done enough to overcome them.”

Out of the wreckage -- anything?

“The original Obama project, the third Democratic wave, is dead,” David Brooks writes in his column. “The next challenge is to find a new project, a new one-sentence description of what this administration hopes to achieve. It is obvious: President Obama will show that this nation is governable once again. He should return to the other element in his original campaign.”

Peggy Noonan, in her Wall Street Journal column: “Mr. Obama is left with America, and he does not, really, understand it. That is why he thinks moving to the center would be political death, when moving to the center and triangulating, as Bill Clinton did, might give him a new lease on life.”

Washington is a hostile place right now. That may be the biggest factor driving the recent round of retirements -- not necessarily fear of reelection, but a calculation about whether it’s worth it to try to come back for ... this.

“Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, the last member of his famous family still serving in elective office, has decided not to seek a ninth term in Congress,” John E. Mulligan reports in the Providence Journal. ” Kennedy’s surprise decision spells the end of an era in American politics, instantly raises the prospects for the congressman’s Republican opponent, state Rep. John Loughlin III, of Tiverton, and may spur a fight among Democratic contenders for the seat.”

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