As we approach the end of Phil Murphy’s first year as governor, one thing has become painfully clear:

When confronted with a tight situation, this guy has an unerring ability to find exactly the wrong thing to say.

To take last things first, that was the pattern we saw with his reaction to the revelations that came in December as a legislative committee looked into allegations made by staffer Katie Brennan. In an October article in the Wall Street journal, Brennan asserted that she had been thwarted at every turn as she tried to report allegations that she had been raped by a fellow campaign worker during the 2017 campaign.

The politically astute reaction for Murphy would have been to proclaim: “Heads will roll!” – to be followed by the rolling of the heads of the staffers who kept him in the dark about the allegations for almost a year.

Nope. When asked about his staffers’ actions, Murphy defended their decision to keep the buck from reaching the point on his desk where it is supposed to stop.

“I have no reason to believe that folks operated in any way other than out of respect for their obligations, both ethically and legally, to confidentiality.”

Nonsense. His staffers’ first obligation is to their boss. And their boss had not yet taken office when at least two of the staffers learned that the transition team was about to give a key job to a guy who sounded like the poster boy for the “me too” movement.

Action then could have forestalled the scandal that finally broke in October. That scandal as we head into the new year.

That legislative committee will spend the first part of 2019 seeking the answers the governor should have gotten back in 2017.

But that’s far from the only gaffe we heard from Murphy this year. Perhaps more puzzling, at least to his fellow Democrats, was the governor’s penchant for playing the race card.

The first time that happened was back in April, when the governor was having a tiff with his fellow Democrat Steve Sweeney over school funding.

The Senate President wanted to update the formula to direct more funds to districts such as the many in his own Gloucester County that were getting shortchanged relative to pupil-population growth.

Such funding fights are common as the state prepares to adopt a budget. But Murphy made this one uncommon after Sweeney held up some of Murphy’s appointments.

Murphy then played the race card, stating that “we have two African-American Ph.D.s on our nominated Cabinet” and going on to state “There’s no reason not to confirm them.”

When asked by reporters about that comment, Sweeney replied, “I can’t possibly in my wildest dreams believe he said that.”

Me neither. Such fights happen all the time and race has nothing to do with them.

But Murphy played the race card again after uttering one of the most astounding gaffes in gubernatorial history.

That came in September, when the Politico website reported that Murphy had hired a former Passaic councilman, Marcellus Jackson, to a $70,000-a year job with the Department of Education – despite the fact that Jackson had served time in federal prison on bribery charges.

State law bans ex-felons from state jobs. But instead of admitting his mistake, Murphy dug in, stating saying “my breath was taken away” by the public outrage over the hiring of a guy who deserved “a second chance.”

A second chance to take a bribe? That’s how most people saw it. Murphy saw it as an opportunity to attack his critics’ motives, stating that in such cases, “It is invariably a person of color we’re talking about.”

Granted, the guy’s from Massachusetts. But he’s been in Jersey long enough to know that here in the Garden State corruption is distributed strictly on an equal-opportunity basis.

At least his target there was a Republican, Assemblywoman Holly Schepisi, of Bergen County, who had been hounding him about the hiring.

The typical tiff pits Murphy against his fellow Democrats.

Another pointless dispute came when Sen. Ray Lesniak, a former state senator from Union County who had run unsuccessfully against Murphy in the 2017 primary, won a completely unexpected victory in the U.S. Supreme Court. Lesniak had sued to have the federal ban on sports betting declared unconstitutional. His long-shot wager paid off.

That set the stage for Murphy to head the few miles from his home to Monmouth Park, which was all set to take bets as soon as the court cleared the way.

Nope. Again Murphy inserted the issue into an ongoing budget fight with his fellow Democrats. His administration announced that any betting parlor that opened immediately would lose its betting privileges.

Lesniak, who is a lawyer, called the move “an abuse of government power” and added, “It’s frightening that a state government agency can threaten a legitimate business like this.”

Eventually the betting began, but it was yet another pointless fight that the governor lost.

He didn’t win many. Even his vaunted “millionaires’ tax” was gutted by Sweeney so it affects only those few taxpayers who make more than $5 million a year.

As we head into 2019, Murphy is already at odds with Sweeney. The governor says more tax hikes may be “on the table” but Sweeney responded that he won’t be setting that table with any tax hikes come budget time.

I’d bet on the Senate President once again. He’s had a grudge against the Guv ever since the 2017 elections, when the New Jersey Education Association launched a jihad against Sweeney in his re-election bid. That led to a fund-raising fight that made it the most expensive race for a state legislative seat in American history.

That ended up as a a big victory for Sweeney - and a big loss for Murphy, who has functioned as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the NJEA.

There’s one thing that wasn’t Murphy’s fault, but hampers him nonetheless. It came from his predecessor, Chris Christie. On his way out the door of the Governor’s office, Christie slammed it on his successor.

He did so by starting a $300 million renovation of the executive wing of the Statehouse. That had the effect of keeping the winner in the fight for the Governor’s Office from occupying the actual governor’s office.

Instead of sitting at the desk once occupied by Woodrow Wilson, Murphy sits at a desk in a Siberia up north on State Street. Instead of commanding the Statehouse, Murphy commands a nondescript office building that might better befit an insurance company.

Traditionally the governor is the king of the Statehouse. At the moment the king is Sweeney and the Crown Prince is Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin.

Murphy looks like a mere pretender to the throne.

Maybe he will change that in 2019. But if I may employ a cliché of the sort Murphy loves to invoke, first he’d better get his foot out of his mouth.

ADD: Six things Phil can do to escape another bad year

One: Have a ‘Sister Souljah’ Moment

Phil Murphy needs to take a lesson from Bill Clinton. In the 1992 Democratic presidential primary, Clinton addressed a rally of Jesse Jackson supporters and criticized rap singer – and Rutgers grad – Sister Souljah for a speech in which she said she would suggested black gang members should kill whites instead of each other.

That was just one of Clinton’s many brilliant moves to the middle. So far Murphy has zero. Time to learn from the master.

Two: You’re not in Cambridge anymore; act that way

Though Murphy likes to talk of his working-class roots, he got his undergrad degree from Harvard and his masters from the University of Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile the guy who spent 2018 outsmarting him completed his postgraduate work at the Ironworkers Union after Pennsauken High School. Senate President Steve Sweeney may not have taken any courses in theoretical politics, but when it comes to practical politics, he’s got a big edge in the bare-knuckle brawl that is Trenton.

Murphy needs to take the gloves off.

Three: Give the environmental extremists lip service, but not much else

There are a lot of environmental groups out there that seem to think the most pressing interest the state faces is the need for a ban on the plastic bag.

That’s nice in the abstract, but it’s the sort of thing that would be disastrous to any politician who enacted it. Murphy needs to figure out how to keep that crowd quiet without giving in on demands that will make life miserable for the voters.

Four: Stop passing the pension buck

In his first year, Murphy got away with shortchanging the pension funds by almost $2 billion by blaming the problem on his predecessor. But his promise to “ramp up” payments to the full amount over four years is really a promises to ramp up the debt by billions more.

If he wants to rescue New Jersey’s credit ratings, Murphy needs to find the combination of benefit cuts and contribution increases that will put the fund into balance.

Five: Take property taxes seriously

Now that President Trump has capped the deduction of property taxes far below what many Jerseyans pay, it’s time to take cutting those taxes seriously. Shared services are a good start, but Murphy needs to push for strict enforcement of that 2 percent property-tax cap with the goal of getting more towns to contract out for services that can be provided more efficiently by a neighbor.

Six: Drop the cliches.

We’ll watch our own backs. You watch our tax dollars