It's not that the White House didn't want the Nobel Peace Prize. To have President Barack Obama join the ranks of some of the most influential figures in history (again), like Mother Theresa, George Marshall, Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King, Desmund Tutu, the Dalai Lama, and others is an incredible honor. But with all that good, it was a public relations nightmare, more fodder for late night television and Saturday Night Live skits.
The all-too hasty response to Obama's Nobel Peace Prize Award seems to focus on the wrong aspect: "but he'd only been president for 11 days at the nomination cutoff!" and "he hasn't done anything of value on the internationl stage since becoming president!" Republicans love to take aim at the liberal bias of the nominating committee, claiming Obama won simply because he wasn't George Bush (then again, let's be honest: George W. Bush never exactly got robbed out of winning any kind of peace prize).
The question has been microcosmic, and in that regard has missed the much larger picture: in 2008 and the first months of 2009, it's hard to conceive of anyone who did more to advance the cause of peace in the world than Obama.
As Obama came onto the international stage, he drew unprecedented crowds- not because of some liberal bias in Europe, but because his rhetoric stirred something in the spirits of millions despite their national origins. He gave interviews to tlevision networks broadcasting in countries we've spent the last eight years carpet bombing, and delivered a policy address from a Muslim capitol in an attempt to bridge a cultural divide so deep that its sparked violence between the east and west for decades. The fact is that the moment the world began to wrap its head around the idea that Obama would become President of the United States is the first time it looked into the future and saw something other than war. If that's not a peacemaker, it's hard to conceptualize what is.
And just as importantly, who said Obama had to actually be president while making his contribution to the international dialogue? Going back over century-plus of Nobel laureates, there are select few that were actually political leaders at the time they received their award.
It takes years to build the kind of momentum to overcome the effects of the kind of wars we've fought (and granted, continue to fight) in Afghanistan and Iraq. Obama certainly wasn't going to pull the US back from those (in addition to strained tensions with Russia, Venezuela, Iran, China, North Korea, etc.) in his first eight months in office, let alone the first 11 days. But what he did by actively promoting international understanding- even if it was only rhetoric- was give peace on the diplomatic level perhaps the single biggest boost its seen in the last decade.
And for that, he deserves the award. America- in the beauty of the democracy that allowed its voters to elect this man its leader- should be proud.
