Despite the sniping between the McCain and Obama camps it seems they agree on more than you’d think. The Wall Street Journal reports:

“Only a celebrity of Barack Obama’s magnitude could attract 200,000 fans in Berlin who gathered from the mere opportunity to be in his presence. These are not supporters or even voters, but fans fawning over The One,” McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said in a memo Wednesday. Sen. Obama’s chief message strategist, Robert Gibbs, said, “There’s a fine line between being confident and arrogant. We haven’t been on the national scene for a long time so Barack Obama has to convince people he can do the job.” Sen. Obama plans an annual weeklong vacation to visit his grandmother in his home state of Hawaii in August, a move that could add to the perception that he is overconfident. Republican strategist Glen Bolger said candidates must tread carefully to look presidential without coming off as presumptuous. “His campaign has made the strategic decision that they have to make voters believe the candidate has already won,” Mr. Bolger said. “The risk in that is that there is a fair amount of hubris.”

It seems then both sides agree: Obama is at risk of becoming a figure of derision and his popularity is a double-edged sword.

Some pundits and strategists see danger that McCain will come off as too negative or shrill. (Remember, however, no criticism of The One is really acceptable.) But so long as his campaign is poking fun (rather than screaming) and the entire national media is buzzing over The Ego storyline, this is likely a good approach. (By the way, why does that Obama response ad look like such a stereotypical, old-school negative ad with grainy photos? Perhaps it’s because it’s an all-purpose generic negative ad.)

And that week off in Hawaii that Obama is planning? If Obama sticks to that the RNC will have a field day. (I already imagine the faux walk-on-water photos they’ll be spitting out.) As for the football pep rally Obama is planning for the Convention in Denver, maybe that won’t come off exactly as the Obama team had hoped. Something tells me much of this effort by the McCain team is aimed directly at deflating and undermining the utility of a scene of 100,000 fans shouting “O-bam-a!” By then, the McCain camp hopes that the public will have grown bemused, if not disgusted, by the effort to turn a political campaign into a cultural (or cult) “happening.”