Obama quote of the day (MORE: QUOTE DISPUTED)

Via Dana Milbank (emphasis added on the quote):

Barack Obama has long been his party’s presumptive nominee. Now he’s becoming its presumptuous nominee.

Fresh from his presidential-style world tour, during which foreign leaders and American generals lined up to show him affection, Obama settled down to some presidential-style business in Washington yesterday. He ordered up a teleconference with the (current president’s) Treasury secretary, granted an audience to the Pakistani prime minister and had his staff arrange for the chairman of the Federal Reserve to give him a briefing. Then, he went up to Capitol Hill to be adored by House Democrats in a presidential-style pep rally.

[…]

The 5:20 TBA turned out to be his adoration session with lawmakers in the Cannon Caucus Room, where even committee chairmen arrived early, as if for the State of the Union. Capitol Police cleared the halls — just as they do for the actual president. The Secret Service hustled him in through a side door — just as they do for the actual president.

Inside, according to a witness, he told the House members, “This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for,” adding: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”

Just another day in the life of the Pretender in Chief.

Heck – why even worry about silly little things like “elections”?

(Read more via Memeo)

Update: Jake Tapper writes that another Democrat source is disputing the quote, claiming it was taken out of context:

Republicans and others are jumping on the quote as evidence of Obama’s more egoistic impulses, but other Democrats in the room today suggest that the quote is out of context and twists Obama’s meaning to mean the complete opposite of what he was saying.

“His entire point of that riff was that the campaign is NOT about him,” says a House Democratic staffer. The Post “left out the important first half of the sentence which was something along the lines of ‘it has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. Its about America. I have just become a symbol.'”

Other staffers with whom I spoke back that up, and a Democratic Congressman who isn’t a particular fan of Obama agrees, saying that Obama preceded that quote with something along the lines of, ‘Those people in Germany weren’t excited about me.  They were excited by the prospect of America getting back to being all it could be.'”

Even if that quote is the “actual” quote, it still doesn’t change the arrogance of his statement.   Obama has acted all along as if it were his “destiny” to be president, and the religious undertones  he’s used in many speeches he’s made over the course of his campaign lend additional credence of how he views himself as one who can “heal” this country – and the world, for that matter.  With or without this particular quote, those facts still stand.

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