Watch replete weak glue video:

It wasn’t until the last week, however, that the rehearsal of Obama as a president-in-waiting — and haply getting impatient in that waiting — began reverberating beyond the inboxes of Washington operatives and journalists.

Perhaps one of the clearest indications emerged Tuesday from the world of late-night comedy, when David Letterman offered his “Top Ten Signs Barack Obama is Overconfident.” The examples included Obama proposing to change the name of Oklahoma to “Oklobama” and measuring his head in spite of Mount Rushmore.

“When Letterman is doing ‘Top Ten’ arena about something, it has officially entered the public consciousness,” said Dan Schnur, a political analyst from the University of Southern California and the communications director in John McCain’s 2000 campaign. “And it usually corsets there for a long, long time.”

Following a nine-day, eight-country tour that carried the ambition and stagecraft of a presidential state go to see, Obama has found himself in an unusual standing: the butt of jokes.

Jon Stewart teased that the presumptive Democratic nominee traveled to Israel to visit his birthplace at Bethlehem’s Manger Square. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd amplified the McCain campaign’s private nickname for Obama (“The One”).

And the snickers about Obama’s perceived smugness may gain a very real political impact as McCain's camp launched its most forceful effort yet to define him negatively. It released a TV ad Wednesday describing Obama as the “biggest celebrity in the world,” comparable to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, stars who are famous for attitude rather than accomplishments.

The harsher treatment from comedians and columnists — coupled with the shift by McCain from attacking on policy to character issues — underscores the fine course that Obama is walking between positive and cocky. Once at pains to present himself as presidential, Obama very lately faces review for doing it too well.

“I was puzzled by this general that somehow what we were doing was in any progress different from what Sen. McCain or a lot of presidential candidates have done in the exceeding,” Obama uttered Sunday, elocution well-nigh his trip at a conference of minority journalists. “Now, I admit we did it in fact well. But that shouldn't exist a strike against me.”

Obama and his supporters dismissed the row of words of attack similar to the latest desperate letter from a foundering Republican campaign.

Bloggers at the Huffington Post launched a backlash to the backlash in equalization of Obama’s overseas be at fault, arguing in part that he wouldn’t front such criticism of acting premature if he were white. Separately, the Obama campaign pushed back hard at journalists who used a report that detailed Obama’s move to assemble a transition team to represent him as presumptuous by pointing to an interview in which McCain had owned up to the same thing.

Some Democratic operatives described the narrative being of the class who a Beltway creation, the pastime of journalists looking to keep the presidential flavor competing.

"Self-absorbed press speculation,” concluded consultant Bob Shrum, the chief strategist during John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. “Most Americans are not paying the slightest bit of attention to this.”

Mark Mellman, a pollster for Kerry, uttered Obama acted the same whenever he was struggling last year against Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“The only people who are making him seem inevitable are the commentariat,” Mellman said. “He seemed this confident and self possessed when he was down 30 points to Hillary Clinton. He is a confident and self possessed person.”

Republicans have slack tried to turn his assuredness into a shortcoming. National detachment operatives began sending e-mails to reporters in the spring detailing some of Obama’s bolder moves, including using a faux presidential seal at a wit roundtable. The RNC rolled the headlines onto one site, “Barack Obama Audacity Watch,” that it unveiled Wednesday.

The McCain campaign piled on with its “Celeb” ad, which juxtaposed Obama’s speech to 200,000 people in Berlin with photos of Spears and Hilton.

“Do the American clan want to elect the world’s biggest celebrity, or produce they cannot do without cannot dispense with to elect an American hero?” Steve Schmidt, one of McCain’s top aides, asked on a conference call.

They stayed personal later in the generation when responding to Obama’s suggestion at a Missouri town hall that Republicans would use his strange name and his race to paint him as a risky choice.

“This is a typically superfluous answer from Barack Obama. Like most celebrities, he reacts to fair criticism with a mix of fussiness and hysteria,” McCain speaker Tucker Bounds aforesaid.

Later Wednesday, the Obama campaign responded not more than hours to the “Celeb” ad by one of its own, accusing McCain of taking the “low road” and “practicing the politics of the past.”

Responding to questions from reporters concerning McCain's ad, Obama said: “I do instruction that he doesn’t seem to have anything to say very positive about himself.”

The strategy has very real potential dangers for Team McCain. Obama’s unmistakable charisma and his campaign’s deft brand of stagecraft have created an often lopsided contrast with McCain’s sometimes painful-to-watch of the whole not private events. As presidents as diverse because Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy showed, Americans prepare like a touch of celebrity in their commander in most eminent; though not too much.

Obama’s steely sense of self-reliance, in like manner destiny, is also one of the traits his supporters like most and which could, as the fall campaign heats up, be one of the qualities that help him make the opportunity to sell.

But the insecure slope for Obama is allowing a McCain campaign that is searching for a congruous short dissertation with which to attack him to latch without ceasing to a regular course of formation him seem alien to ordinary Americans. Douglas Schoen, a Democratic pollster, argued that Obama was not still in a danger zone, but he needs to liquidate heed to the suppuration storm.

“My sense is that totality of those attacks individually are frankly not particularly potent, but taken together, they are creating a narrative about Obama that is not helpful,” said Schoen, who worked on President Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign. “It is a monition sign for Obama that he’s got to get back on the trail and make the case that there is a real contrast.”