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.

Zeleny's lede: 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?"

Zeleny: 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: Zeleny: “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.

As Ace named him, Captain Bullsh!t stood before the adoring masses in Berlin and delivered a speech that lacked only the burning torches and shouts of “Sieg Heil” to transport one back in time to the 1930s when another charismatic leader took power with a ton of vague promises.

John Rosenthal at Pajamas Media, cites the Nazi symbolism: “the specific history of the ‘Victory Column’ makes its choice as backdrop for Obama’s German photo opportunity at least ironic, if not downright troubling. For what the candidate and his handlers have decided is the appropriate ‘scenery’ for his Berlin appearance was, in effect, created by none other than Adolf Hitler and his own maestro of political dramaturgy Albert Speer.

The ‘Victory Column’ as such already existed before Hitler and Speer decided that it would form a suitable centerpiece for the ‘East-West Axis’: one of the two major thoroughfares laid out in their megalomaniacal plans for a ‘new’ Berlin redesigned to reflect the power of the new German Reich. The polarity of column and gate — with the two monuments providing dramatic points of reference for the mass demonstrations so beloved of the Nazis — undoubtedly figured in their calculations,” Rosenthal writes.

The Victory Column, in the background, was made taller and relocated for Hitler's 50th birthday celebration on April 20, 1939, with a massive display of German military might including a parade of troops and army hardware and an accompanying air show.

James Lewis at American Thinker says the Berlin scene is the product of Obama’s runaway egotistical blind spot: “A Nuremberg-style mass rally in Germany is not exactly the natural stage for an American presidential candidate to strut his stuff.   It's exactly the opposite of the usual politician's schtick in America. "I'm just a little ole country boy" assures the voters that you don't have the swelled head.”

David Brooks, op-ed writer at The New York Times, admits Obama’s schtick has finally worn thin by hearing the same stump speech since Iowa.

“When I first heard this sort of radically optimistic speech in Iowa, I have to confess my American soul was stirred. It seemed like the overture for a new yet quintessentially American campaign. But now it is more than half a year on, and the post-partisanship of Iowa has given way to the post-nationalism of Berlin, and it turns out that the vague overture is the entire symphony. The golden rhetoric impresses less, the evasion of hard choices strikes one more… the speech fed the illusion that we could solve our problems if only people mystically come together… This was the end of history on acid.”

Brooks concludes that Obama “has grown accustomed to putting on this sort of saccharine show for the rock concert masses, and in Berlin his act jumped the shark. His words drift far from reality, and not only when talking about the Senate Banking Committee. His Berlin Victory Column treacle would have made Niebuhr sick to his stomach.”  

Lordy David, you sound like the Obama acid kool-aid has worn off. You better go back to the cooler and get another drink before you get fired.

Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz quotes another reporter who also sounds like his kool-aid wore off, Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass, who wrote of the Obama world tour coverage: "McCain is now cast as the crabby uncle who visits and shrieks there's no gin in your house," while Obama is "busy fighting off throngs of reporters, a cast of thousands as urgent and impassioned as in those old Hollywood biblical epics."

Kurtz also quotes Ralph Begleiter, a former CNN correspondent, now journalist in residence at the University of Delaware, who says the notion that Obama was making real news -- as opposed to exploiting pretty backdrops -- is "a sham argument. Of course it's a photo op. If he wanted to go to Afghanistan as a senator, he could have done it."

I could be wrong and often am, but I think Obama's ego has finally been put on such obvious display with his over-the-top speech in Berlin that this will be the turning point when voters begin to ask, as Charles Krauthammer did a week ago, Who Does He Think He Is?

Slublog answers the question.

President Kennedy went to Berlin to make a speech declaring America's resolve to win the Cold War. President Reagan went to Berlin to make a speech that proclaimed the victorious end of the Cold War with "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Obama went to Berlin to offer himself to the world as the "new messiah." There's only one Messiah. And it ain't Obama.