Osama raid also vanquishes Trump

In announcing the death of Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama understandably left out the part about how the military operation had also done away with Donald Trump's presidential candidacy, making room only for the serious to compete.

Donald Trump doesn't know it's over, of course. But the rest of us should. It can take something as weighty as the killing of the world's most-wanted terrorist to remember that politics isn't a sport. Trump was playing the race as a reality show, and we let him. Harmless and mostly ignored during his previous brushes with politics, he cried wolf louder this time to get the attention he believes he deserves.

A successful president has to glide like a duck through his public schedule while paddling furiously beneath the surface to deal with the non-public crises that make up a chief executive's life. Over the course of the meetings with his national security team deciding whether to send commandos into the fortified compound in Pakistan suspected of housing bin Laden, the president was dealing with a possible government shutdown, the federal budget, a trip to Latin America, fresh military action in Libya and the deadliest tornadoes to hit the United States in almost 40 years.

Thanks to Trump, that full agenda also included weighing whether pressing for release of his long-form birth certificate by Hawaii officials would halt the malignant birther movement.

How much more pertinent Obama's birth-certificate news conference now seems. The president, noting how he can't usually get live network coverage for more pressing matters, said of the false controversy, "We've got better stuff to do. I've got better stuff to do. We've got big problems to solve." As we now know, this was a matter of days before the raid was carried out.

The end of Trump began less than 24 hours before the takedown of bin Laden. At the White House Correspondents' Association's dinner on Saturday, Trump was reduced to a laugh line. "Donald Trump has been saying he would run for president as a Republican," comedian Seth Meyers said, "which is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a joke."

With much of the country's attention soaked up by the blowhard from Queens, the quieter presidential prospects -- that's all of them -- have had a hard time being heard.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is the anti- Trump. He's that mythical "adult" Washington Republicans keep talking about. Often described as a policy-and-numbers guy without much charisma, he's a solid public servant with a sunny but modest disposition who's kept Indiana solvent while other states are going broke. He's mostly done this without embracing his party's reverse-Robin Hood ethic.

People are attracted to flamboyant characters when they feel insecure. Even after invading Afghanistan and Iraq and putting ourselves into perilous debt to pursue a global war on terror, Americans had to wait a decade to avenge the awful wrong done on 9/11.

As a crowd gathered outside the White House gates to chant "USA! USA!" and sing the national anthem on Sunday night, the world was right again, if only for a time -- as well as a less-hospitable place for those who would reduce our politics to a sideshow.

Trump does deserve some credit for serving the Republican establishment's desire to stop the soap opera-worthy candidacy of Sarah Palin. As he rose, she sank, to 10 percent among Republicans in a recent Gallup poll. There was room for only one bizarro candidate in the race at a time.

Now there's room for none.