Like Dr. Frankenstein, the mainstream media is getting nervous about the monster they have created. A Washington Post reporter, describing Barack Obama’s meeting with Congressional Democrats, frets: “Perhaps he’s beginning to believe the hype” and quotes Obama as saying to his fellow Democrats, “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.” Gulp. Then the Post’s Dana Millbank tells us:

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. . .Some say the supremely confident Obama — nearly 100 days from the election, he pronounces that “the odds of us winning are very good” — has become a president-in-waiting. But in truth, he doesn’t need to wait: He has already amassed the trappings of the office, without those pesky decisions.

And even a conflicted Maureen Dowd senses thing have gotten out of hand:

At home, Jon Stewart was poking fun at the grandiosity of the “Obama Quest” and “the Obamanauts.” He showed film clips of “our hero” in chain mail fighting off dragons and a Cyclops in his crusade to come home and rule over Dreamerica. . .The Obamanauts were so elated that they didn’t even seem to mind the caricature of Obama, ears sticking out, that had been drawn on the round We-Are-The-World Obama logo in the press section. The cartoon candidate demanded: “Worship me.”

Well, if this all seems too much for the pundits they have only themselves to blame. They tingled, they gaped, they pumped, they spun, they tore down his primary opponent and they debased themselves by leaving their objectivity home and muting their demands for decent access to the candidate and reasonable disclosure of information. So if the Creature is now out of control and the subject of ridicule and even mocking (see, he was funny after all), then they might examine the coverage they have afforded him these many months. Once can hardly blame the Great One for believing his press clippings.