"The steady gaze of my own conscience"

In July of 2011, I said that if you ever hear someone refer to his own conscience, beware. For most of us, our conscience is such an integral part of us that we don't think of it as a separate, distinct entity. Our capacity to feel embarrassment, our inner brakes, are just there, taken for granted. It is only the sociopath who actually talks about his conscience.

(For the complete explanation, please refer to the post linked above.)

I have long thought Barack Obama to be a narcissistic personality, but have stopped short of calling him a sociopath. Then I ran across this quote from his second book, The Audacity of Hope:

"I find comfort in the fact that the longer I’m in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for power and rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience."

Not only does Obama talk about his conscience, he attributes a steady gaze to it. Yikes.

(Note to Barack: wouldn't "steely" have been an even better word?) 

George Will himself recently said, "Obama's intellectual sociopathy -- his breezy and somewhat loutish indifference to truth -- should no longer startle."  

That, too, stops short of calling Obama an outright sociopath; but it certainly comes close.

I'm not sure what to think at this point.