AP veteran Ron Fournier has coined a potentially harmful look-out, watch-out description of Obama: He thinks he’s hot stuff.

[T]here’s a line smart politicians don’t cross — somewhere between “I’m qualified to be president” and “I’m born to be president.” Wherever it lies, Barack Obama better watch his step.

He’s bordering on arrogance

The man from audacity “can be a bit too cocky for his own good,” says Fournier. 

“To know me is to love me,” Obama said in July.  “Every place is Barack Obama country once Barack Obama’s been there,” he said later.

True, there’s a certain amount of tongue-in-cheekiness to such remarks — almost as if Obama doesn’t want to take his adoring crowds and political ascent too seriously. He was surely kidding when he told supporters in January that by the time he was done speaking “a light will shine down from somewhere.”

“It will light upon you,” he continued. “You will experience an epiphany. And you will say to yourself, I have to vote for Barack. I have to do it.”

Kidding on the square, as my father used to say?

O. and his wife “ooze a sense of entitlement.”  She recently laid it on heavily, calling him “one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics” — we should be very grateful — and we will get only one chance to elect him.

With the entitlement will come his feeling very hurt if we don’t elect him, with accompanying emotions from his supporters, especially those who seethe with their feelings of victimhood — the other side of the volatile entitlement equation.

Update: A former reporter for the Hyde Park Herald recalls O. from his state senate days, when he was prone to a hot response and willing to bully a newsman:

It’s not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks ago, but not this garbage.

Months earlier, a reporter friend told me she overheard Obama call me an asshole at a political fund-raiser. Now here he is blasting me from hundreds of miles away for a story that just went online but hasn’t yet hit local newsstands.

It’s the first time I ever heard him yell, and I’m trembling as I set down the phone. I sit frozen at my desk for several minutes, stunned.

Yet more interesting, in those days he was Emil Jones’s man.  Jones, senate president, became his “kingmaker,” writes Todd Spivak in the Houston (TX) Press:

“Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator,” Jones told former alderman, now talk-show host Cliff Kelley, an old friend.  “Oh, you are? Who might that be?” asked Kelley in a conversation both confirmed for Spivak.  “Barack Obama.”

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

O’s earmark requests were to include “tens of millions for Jones’s Senate district.” 

Back to O. as intimidating:

I was 25 and had no problem interviewing big-wig politicians. But I always had to steel my nerves when calling Obama. His intelligence was intimidating, and my hands inevitably shook with sweat.

Barack, we hardly know ye.

On Today Show today on NBC, Melinda Henneberger, once-NYT reporter, now Slate contributor, says Obama is helped by the preacher-friend controversy because it puts to rest the idea that he’s a Muslim.  He “answered an altar call 20 years ago.”

On same show, Michael Dyson, the itinerant Afro-studies prof once at DePaul U., refers to “so-called inflammatory rhetoric” of the preacher friend and backs him up in his analysis of American history AND is a fervent Obama supporter.

Meanwhile, are we to believe no white people are going to rethink their Obama commitment when he merely rejects certain sayings of this preacher but not the preacher himself, for whom the sayings reflect his fervent beliefs — unless we think these spiels were aberrations for him, which no one is saying.

Obama likes the guy, is obviously quite comfortable with him as an individual, even has a warm relationship, even as the guy is a race-baiter of the first water.  Four years coming up of the smooth-talking left-wing president whose friends we have to ignore?  God bless and save America.

No other churches for Obama to pick?

At some point, in some venue, Mr. Obama is going to have to give a speech directly addressing his longtime pastor’s views and answering a simple question: Why didn’t he find another church that didn’t include a leader who so frequently engaged in such hate speech?

That’s John Fund in WSJ.com’s Political Diary, voicing my very thought in the matter.  It’s been 30 years (this month, in fact) since I regularly attended church on assignment.  But I must say that there have to be other South Side churches and preachers — black, white, and indifferent — that don’t demagogue the Gospel.

But O. found something he was looking for in this church that he could find in no other, we assume, and now he’s stuck with this wild-man preacher.

Look, even Catholics can pick and choose among Catholic churches.  As a Protestant, O. is part of a tradition where picking and choosing got its biggest boost religion-wise.

He did not know about the man’s oratorical proclivities, he says.  He wasn’t there when he said this or that.  But how many sermons did O. have to miss not to catch the drift of this man, who is not a crazy uncle he inherited but a spiritual father whom he chose?

He was surprised to hear the man talks this way, as “so contrary to my own life and beliefs.”  If only he had known.

And where did those worshipers come from pictured in the video cheering the pastor on?  Did they pop in knowing he would uncork something big and exciting that day?  Were they surprised when he talked that way?