President Obama comes to town today to deliver what the White House is billing as a landmark speech at Cooper Union to push stringent new federal regulation of Wall Street in the name of “financial oversight.”

This will play well on Main Street.

But in New York, Wall Street is Main Street – the centerpiece of the city’s economy.

So the president and his fellow Democrats need to proceed with great care.

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Clearly, the party sees this one as a political winner: Yesterday, it launched a major fund-raising appeal based on Obama’s “Wall Street reform” plan, warning against a return to the days when “big banks feasted [and] just about everybody else suffered.”

But that kind of rhetorical overkill is a dagger to the heart of an industry that is the heart of New York’s economic well-being.

One in 12 working New Yorkers are connected to the financial sector, which generates fully 40 percent of the city’s business and personal-tax revenue.

Every $1 billion in Wall Street profits means $70 million in direct taxes for the city’s cash-starved coffers.

“Financial services is the most important industry for the New York City economy and the biggest job creator in the region,” notes Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan) on her Web site.

And if Wall Street is threatened, those jobs — and that tax revenue — can very easily move elsewhere.

To London. To Hong Kong.

Anywhere but America — and that, obviously, would damage the entire nation.

That’s why Mayor Bloomberg warns that “the bashing of Wall Street is something that should worry everybody.”

Not that Wall Street hasn’t brought a lot of this on itself, of course.

The dangerous risk-taking and often-reckless policies that sparked the 2008 crisis are more than enough reason for Wall Street to be subjected to an added layer of constructive oversight.

But when such regulation is driven by partisan hysteria and rhetorical overkill, the results can scarcely be positive.

The president and his Democratic allies need to think long and hard about the full economic impact of the draconian regulation and confiscatory taxation they propose to enact.

As Bloomberg has said, they should be doing “what’s right for the country, not what is politically popular.”