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Lack of birth control shows how lost prez is

It would be bad enough to compare the Obama White House to the New York Mets of today — but right now, the Obama White House would be lucky to be merely that bad. What it resembles most closely is the fabled rookie team that went 40-120 in 1962, the gaggle about whom Casey Stengel famously cried, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

I’m not talking about the wisdom or lack thereof Obama has shown on the ludicrous issue of his long-form birth certificate. One can assume that for a long time, the White House thought the issue wasn’t really a problem, or even that the obsession over it in certain quarters was actually helping the president.

Now, however, it thinks the issue is hurting Obama, so it’s trying to bring the controversy to an end by doing something it clearly could’ve done anytime over the past three years.

But that isn’t what made yesterday such a disaster. What invoked the 1962 Mets was the White House staging of the birth certificate’s release.

Did no one in the White House spend five seconds making sure there were no other events going on yesterday morning — like, oh, say, Donald Trump taking a trip to New Hampshire with reporters hungry to follow him?

Since Trump was right there in front of the media’s microphones talking about the birth certificate before Obama got to microphones in the White House, we were subjected to the dumbfounding sight of the press room at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. standing empty as the president found himself forced to wait out a reality-TV performer and real-estate brand-name sleazing slanderous nonsense about him and his college grades through the airwaves.

Finally, Obama must’ve had enough and came out to speak anyway. Then he began by complaining about how, if he had come to talk about foreign policy, the networks wouldn’t have given him the time.

True — but the reason the networks went live with his comments about his own birth certificate was that he had lowered himself to Donald Trump’s level.

He is the president of the United States, for God’s sake. And yet he allowed himself to become a supporting player in someone else’s reality-TV show by whining about how he could only get the time of day from the broadcast gods by talking about his birth certificate.

Even more astonishing, he stepped on his own major news of the day, which involved the choice of David Petraeus to head the CIA.

Petraeus is arguably the most admired man in America, and his selection is exactly the sort of thing that can make a president look good. What doesn’t make a president look good is when he seems to be in a war of words with a man with hair the consistency of cotton candy who fires Gary Busey and Omarosa on television’s lowest-ranked network.

This is another in a string of events and speeches and appearances in which Obama acts in ways that make him smaller, pettier and less consequential than the office he is occupying.

Forget Casey Stengel. Julie Taymor would have done less damage to Obama if she had put the president up on wires and sent him sailing through the air during “Spider-Man” before her firing.

Those who hope for Obama’s re-election have good reason to be alarmed at the way the sure-footed political instincts he showed in 2008 have so profoundly deserted him in the course of his presidency. Because that might lead to his firing at the hands of the electorate.

johnpodhoretz@gmail.com