Obama's hype

Perhaps it was jet lag catching up with him, but Obama committed a little-noticed gaffe as he talked with Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times on his campaign jet between Paris and London. The headline says it all: Going for that Presidential Look, but Trying Not to Overdo It.

LONDON — He stood in the shadow of the Temple of Hercules, held forth at the Élysée Palace and convened a one-man news conference here on Saturday outside No. 10 Downing Street, all with a simple aim: to make a one-term senator from Illinois look presidential to voters back home in America. But along the way to appearing presidential, did Senator Barack Obama cross a political line — as he and his advisers quietly feared, and some Republicans hoped — by coming across as too presumptuous?

He left out the part about Obama inviting himself to Berlin to "look Presidential" while giving a speech supposedly like JFK and Reagan, but lets not talk about that because that might come across as "too presumptuous?"

Leaning forward in his chair aboard a campaign plane freshly emblazoned with his logo, he added, “We thought it was worth the risk.”

So there's a bald-face admission: "We" as in the royal personage himself, calculated the politics of the entire trip with the aim of Obama "appearing presidential" and decided that though it might be presumed as "too presumptuous" by some for a mere candidate to put himself where two real honest-to-God Presidents had made speeches at pivotal moments in history, and for the mere candidate with nothing accomplished as yet to make other-worldly claims as being the great world leader we all have been waiting for, "was worth the risk."

And then way at the end, where you might have missed it had you not plowed on through this self-serving tripe, was the biggest gaffe:

“We don’t buy our own hype,” Mr. Obama said.

A political gaffe is when a politician slips up and actually speaks the truth. If Obama doesn't buy his own hype, why should we?

But we, the voters, are supposed to buy the hype, all the way until the first Tuesday in November. After that, he won't need us anymore.

But Obama doesn't even see his "hype" admission as a gaffe. After all, he's the messiah, and messiahs never make mistakes, right? He repeated almost the same words to Maureen Dowd, New York Times op-ed columnist, for the Sunday edition.

Dowd: How does he like the McCain camp mocking him as “The One”?

Obama: “Even if you start believing your own hype, which I rarely do, things’ll turn on you pretty quick anyway,” he said. “I have a fairly steady temperament that has at times been interpreted as, ‘Oh, he’s sort of too cool.’ But it’s not real."

"Not real." Now there's a description of Obama by Obama that I can believe in.