There have been no new cases of Ebola diagnosed in the United States over the past few days, which is good news generally and good news for President Obama in particular. He has to be greatly relieved to see this little episode receding in the rear-view mirror. What a fiasco! To watch his fumbling response to the Ebola threat has been painful even for me—and I’m no fan of our community organizer-in-chief.

Obama doesn’t seem to understand the president’s role at the center of such a crisis. He acts as if playing it cool, attending a fundraiser or two, playing some golf, showing that he’s not worried, is what the rubes want. (Or maybe he just doesn’t care what the rubes want; that’s certainly a possibility.) And when public concern crystallizes into a specific demand—in this case that commercial air traffic from affected West African countries be suspended—he thinks it’s his job to argue the American public out of such a stupid idea.

Well, maybe suspending commercial air traffic is a bad idea, though it must be said that the arguments against it trotted out by Obama and his team were loess than compelling. Anyhow, it would have done little harm to impose such a ban—and to impose it would have demonstrated that the President was listening to the American people.

No doubt we can all agree that in a crisis situation one of a president’s most important tasks is to calm people’s fears. But to do that you have to take those fears seriously. Even if you know they’re overblown, based on media hysteria, etc., you can’t simply pooh-pooh them. No, you say something along the lines of: “I understand and share your concerns. This is a serious problem but let me assure you that we have the resources to contain Ebola and prevent it from spreading.” This is Leadership 101.

But what did we get instead? In the early going the President and his people did nothing to address people’s understandable fears. When there were mistakes and missteps, understandable in the circumstances, we got bureaucratic doubletalk from a parade of functionaries. Meanwhile, the media were fanning the flames of fear and uncertainty, with much hand-wringing and heavy breathing over the supposed incompetence of the CDC, etc. and so forth. What was needed was a presidential response. But we didn’t get one until the White House realized that Ebola was becoming a serious political problem. Hence the emergency cabinet meetings and the belated appointment of a (probably unnecessary) Ebola czar.

You may say that a public-health emergency goes beyond politics. However desirable such an attitude may be, it’s utopian. If the government is involved it’s political—and that’s particularly true when the person in the Oval Office is a proponent and champion of government. Barack Obama has told us more than once that government is the solution. But actions speak louder than words and in this case, they scream. The incompetence—administrative, political, personal—of the President and his administration have severely damaged the big-government brand.