The Ebola crisis has all but handed President Obama a chance to look like a hero.  It’s one of the few opportunities he has to use government purposefully, as well as to right his own sinking legacy-ship by a few degrees.

But he’s bungled it — either out of incompetence, or it’s deliberate: consider his evident pattern of thumbing his nose at the will of the American people, by using executive power and his magic pen; as well as his obsession with political correctness.

Ebola is not a “J.V.” disease. Fast and furiously, it’s wiping out swaths of humanity — nearly as mercilessly as the varsity terrorists of ISIS (aka al-Qaida).  And it’s here, in the U.S., belying his declarations — and those of the Center for Disease Control’s Dr. Thomas Frieden — that it would stay over there.  As recently as this past Thursday, Dr. Frieden wrote on foxnews.com that he does not support a travel ban because it would “isolate parts of the world, or people who aren’t sick, because that’s going to drive patients with Ebola underground, making it infinitely more difficult to address the outbreak.”

If you buy that, fine.  But just because these two men have titles, podiums and microphones doesn’t mean they are right.

Mitigating disaster is a two-and-a-half-step process: first, work with countries whose ports are frequented by west Africans, and ban domestic travel to and from west African countries. (This is apparently quite simple. Recall how swiftly the president grounded U.S. flights to Ben Gurion during the Hamas terror attacks on Israel this past summer.) Secondly, use military aircraft to fly specially-trained and equipped health care workers to the affected areas.  Finally, keep in place the recently-implemented airport screenings.

This would allow the government to do one of its favorite things: exert control — in this case, to control a crisis that’s spinning out of control. It would also dramatically reduce the possibility that a member of an airplane cleaning crew would become infected.  In New York, their union recently expresed legitimate concern over this. An Obama-initiated travel ban could earn him points on that front too.

In 2008, candidate Obama declared he wanted to make government “cool” again. Assuming it was cool at some point, he still has a window of opportunity to make it so.