The Iowa legislature’s 2012 session is over. Our senators and representatives put in long days and nights — more than they were getting paid for, even. But at the end of the day, they were pathetic. Their prevailing conception of politics was absolutely wrong.

At the end of April, some Republican legislators suggested they wanted to simply adjourn the session and go home, leaving their business unfinished.

From a simple appropriations standpoint, that may have been feasible: Last year the legislature passed a budget for this full year and half of a budget for next year. The money wouldn’t have run out until January, by which time a new election presumably would have put Republican majorities in both houses and ended the divided government we have to deal with currently.

Then, on Thursday, Gov. Terry Branstad said he is open to calling a special session of the Legislature to pass property tax reform. He said, however, for him to do that, he would need assurance from Senate Democrats that they would pass a bill very close to the one the House passed with Republican support. According to one news story, Branstad said, “I want an assurance that they will have the votes to do it. I don’t want to call them back unless we feel confident that they have the votes and they’re going to come in and do it.”

The fact that some of Iowa’s dignitaries considered abandoning their posts to wait for more favorable election results is beyond words — and I say that from the standpoint of a citizen who thinks he has some idea of what politics is and who watched the legislative game at the statehouse for three sessions. If our trustees of the public good are unwilling to stick it out, how can they ask us to maintain our confidence in any of the institutions we hold dear?

Good politicians don’t need party or ideological majorities to pass their legislation. They can find common ground in any situation. To the extent that we have such representatives and senators in office as those Republicans who kept at the back of their minds the idea of quitting and coming back to Iowa’s public problems after ideologically favorable election returns, we have in office cowards instead of politicians.

As Yury Zhivago said, “A grown-up man is supposed to grit his teeth and share in whatever’s coming to his country.”

Another poet, Robert Frost, observed, “The best way out is always through.” Although a poet, his message is instructive: We cannot genuinely solve our problems unless we confront them. To misquote another poet, William Shakespeare, politics is not politics which fails to alter when alteration finds.

Ignoring the elephant in the room is useless. And it’s not political, at all.

What is political ties us together in relationships with other people, and the problems that arise from those relations require collaboration to work out solutions. There is nothing political, however, in waiting to work out those solutions by waiting for election results to deliver a like-minded majority.

Waiting for elections to put into office carbon copies of politicians — to give us the same viewpoint a second, third or fourth time — amounts to copping out on solving the problems we face — together, not each of us individually.

The legislative process is more than voting in elections and then voting on bills. Preference for that method ignores the vital differences that separate the members of any governing body, from the Government of the Student Body here at Iowa State to the City Council of Ames to the House of Representatives and Senate of the State of Iowa, or to Congress itself — or any committee in between those levels or in the executive branch. The legislative process, as with all politics, requires compromise.

Rejecting compromise with other humans rejects the different vantage points each person brings to a discussion; our ideas are informed by everything from the culture of the place we grew up, religion, ethnic traditions, family life and all the rest of our preferences. Healthy politics requires a diversity of opinion; any number of dittoheads shouting in a room how much they agree with one another does nothing and is political tyranny.

Politicians should embrace disagreement, rather than shun it.

We need thrill-seeking politicians. We need our representatives to have political bloodlust coursing through their veins: We need them to seek out issues, controversies and problems, pull their colleagues into the ring alongside them and stay there until they tame those problems. We need politicians who will play the game for the game’s own sake.

Unfortunately, the members of the Iowa General Assembly and now Branstad have shown how lacking they are in genuine political talent and ambition.

They could learn something from one of the most talented and ambitious men in history, Napoleon Bonaparte: “Victory belongs to the most persevering.”