Byron York at the Examiner has the skinny on a weird episode that took place on Thursday night at the Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Washington.

Perhaps "weird" is the wrong word; more like "creepy" as in making the hairs on the back of your head stand up. It takes "self-referential" to an entirely new and worrisome level.

It makes one wonder what someone as full of themselves as Obama is capable of doing:

After listing his administration's accomplishments and vowing that "our most urgent task is job creation," Obama pledged to keep fighting for a national health care system. "We knew this was hard," Obama said. And then he described a letter he received from a campaign worker who suffered from breast cancer and has since died:

I got a letter -- I got a note today from one of my staff -- they forwarded it to me -- from a woman in St. Louis who had been part of our campaign, very active, who had passed away from breast cancer. She didn't have insurance. She couldn't afford it, so she had put off having the kind of exams that she needed. And she had fought a tough battle for four years. All through the campaign she was fighting it, but finally she succumbed to it. And she insisted she's going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt.

Many observers have noted that the president often seems extraordinarily self-referential. It's all about him, they say. But even those critics might be a little taken aback by the "buried in an Obama t-shirt" remark. Is it really that much about him?

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You can see that the crowd laughed after the "t-shirt" comment -- perhaps because they thought it was funny or perhaps because it made them a bit uneasy. In any event, Obama was serious.

Most people still resist believing how wrapped up this guy is in his own ego. It would be helpful if he had advisors who weren't equally taken in by the mythos of their boss. Axelrod, Emanuel, Plouffe, Gibbs - they've all drunk the Obama kool aid and are incapable of pointing out to their boss how things like this come off to ordinary Americans.

There is nothing wrong with a president having self-confidence. We demand that in our leaders. But stuff like this - and his constant, annoying use of the pronoun "I" - reveal a man so in love with his supposed abilities and intellect that even when the people tell him he's on the wrong track (as they did in the Massachusetts senate race), he refuses to acknowledge it and, indeed, turns the message into a self-referencing verification of his own election. The American people aren't mad at him or his Democratic colleagues. They're mad at Bush! So instead of changing course as the people clearly want him to do, Obama doubles down on his far left agenda and still believes that by ramming home health care reform, everything will be peachy for the Democrats in November.

The only time it isn't about him is when it comes to failure. Not passing health care reform is the Republican's fault. Recalcitrance in the Middle East is Israel's fault, not his idiotic policies. The deficit is Bush's fault. Despite overwhelming majorities in both houses of congress, the failure in advancing the rest of his agenda is due to GOP "obstructionism."

It is a symptom of narcissism to find scapegoats for one's own failures. It is also a sign of narcissism when one is oblivious to how their self-referential personae is perceived by normal people. That nervous laughter by Democrats following Obama's statement about how he is so beloved that people are willing to go to their grave proclaiming their Obama worship should ordinarily be a warning sign to the advisors around the president that something is not quite right with their boss.

Apparently, the cocoon in which they have taken refuge in the White House won't allow them to see the trouble they are in.