We’re going to turn America around!

That’s said pretty much every election. In recent years, it has almost always been true, too. America keeps turning around, doing little more than feinting in one direction before turning the other way, over and over and over again.

It’s very entertaining.

You had to love the way most Democratic U.S. senators and members of the House, with fingers to the wind, tried to distance themselves from the president this fall. Central to almost every close campaign was this forthright message:

“Obama? Huh. Name rings a bell. Can’t say I really know him.”

Pennsylvania was different. Republican Gov. Tom Corbett was so far behind Democratic challenger Tom Wolf that even Mr. Corbett’s last, desperate commercials showing Michelle Obama campaigning for Mr. Wolf in Philadelphia couldn’t move the needle. Mr. Wolf got almost 55 percent of the vote and Mr. Corbett got early retirement, the first Pennsylvania governor to lose his re-election bid since second terms have been allowed.

So now Mr. Wolf faces a situation analogous to the president’s: He’s looking at big Republican majorities in both houses of the General Assembly (still America’s largest full-time state legislature!). You’re going to be reading a lot of stories about how difficult it is for a chief executive to govern this way, a general bemoaning of the gridlock that is bound to ensue when there’s a split like this.

Hah! You live in Pennsylvania. You know you don’t need two parties to make a good split. Why, just this week, both Republicans and Democrats were throwing punches among themselves.

In Harrisburg, on Election Day no less, state Senate Republican leaders sued Mr. Corbett. Yeah. They claimed he’d intruded on their legislative authority by using the line-item veto to punish them.

They’d been steaming since July, when Mr. Corbett deleted $65 million from the General Assembly accounts. The governor didn’t like that they had feathered their own nest while making no progress toward pension reform. That left the General Assembly with only about $265 million to maintain 253 lamakers. It’s a wonder they didn’t put out a late-night public service announcement asking for help.

The bitterness here is somewhat bipartisan. Senate President Pro Tem Joe Scarnati, R-Jefferson, and Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, R-Delaware, were joined in the suit by Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa, D-Forest Hills. The suit isn’t expected to be dropped just because Mr. Corbett dropped Tuesday.

Closer to home, a couple of Allegheny County Democrats had dueling press conferences Thursday, with county Controller Chelsa Wagner throwing the first punch. She said county Executive Rich Fitzgerald had cost taxpayers thousands of dollars by driving his county vehicle for political purposes, and she brought out a small stack of color charts to illustrate that. (Find it on YouTube, kids!)

A Post-Gazette photo the next day showed Mr. Fitzgerald looking as if he’d just been served a plate of bad mussels in the Strip District, but it was only him responding to the controller’s charges. He said he does government work during political trips and doesn’t bill the county while using his own car on the job. He pledged to tell his staff to be more precise in filling out his vehicle usage reports, but Ms. Wagner was just “playing gotcha.”

“This is a woman who never goes to work,’’ he said.

That hardly seems fair. Somebody in the controller’s office put an awful lot of work into matching his Twitter feeds to his odometer readings for those way cool “Missing Miles’’ charts. But this feud goes back years. Mr. Fitzgerald should consider this payback for booting Ms. Wagner from a reception he and Mayor Bill Peduto were hosting in New York last December.

Petty? Sure. Intraparty slapfights are a Pittsburgh tradition. We had Democrats Cyril Wecht and Gene Coon bitterly battling for county power back in the ’70s, City council members Eugene “Jeep” DePasquale and Michelle Madoff at each others’ throats in the ’80s, and Republican county Commissioners Larry Dunn and Bob Cranmer so at odds in the ’90s that they punted away the first GOP majority in the county in 60 years.

Let lesser places worry about two-party gridlock. This is Pennsylvania. We don’t consider it a party until it gets rowdy.

Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947.

First Published: November 9, 2014, 5:00 a.m.
Updated: November 10, 2014, 5:55 p.m.