As the following attests, I was in the vanguard of those deriding and criticizing the Norwegian Nobel Committee for awarding President Obama the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize:
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more ardent and hopeful supporter of President Barack Obama than me. But I think this award is … well … a bit much.
For no matter the rationalization, there’s no denying that the Nobel Committee awarded it – just nine months into his presidency – not for what he has done, but for who he is.
‘Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future… [He has ushered in] a change in the international climate.’ (The Norwegian Nobel Committee)
Indeed, the irony is not lost on me that the committee awarded him not for doing anything to prevent climate change, but for changing the climate with what amounts to hot air…
Which brings me to this final word about the Norwegian cabal behind the Nobel Prize: It is naïve to think that politics do not govern its purportedly merit-based selections.
(“Obama Awarded (Affirmative Action) Nobel Peace Prize,” The iPINIONS Journal, October 10, 2009)
Therefore, I was relieved when I read yesterday that no less a person than Obama himself was deriding and criticizing the Committee behind closed doors at the White House. For here’s how The Associated Press reported on the way Rahm Emanuel, his then chief of staff, poured scorn on the Norwegians for raining on Obama’s historic parade up 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with what could only be described as a Nobel PR stunt:
A senior Norwegian diplomat says his country’s former ambassador to the United States was given a verbal lashing by Barack Obama’s chief of staff when the president was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.
Morten Wetland said Thursday the ambassador, Wegger Stroemmen, was approached by Rahm Emanuel, now Chicago’s mayor, who accused Norway of ‘fawning’ to the newly elected U.S. leader.
Of course, anyone who knows Rahm’s consigliore style knows that “fawning” was not the only f-word he used. More importantly, though, the way he reportedly laid into that Norwegian ambassador debunks the prevailing view that the congenitally self-possessed Obama was exhibiting false modesty (or blowing more hot air) when he reacted to news of his Nobel Peace Prize as follows:
To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize.
(New York Times, October 9, 2009)
Never mind the truly humbling fact that Obama has done little over the past five years to be any more deserving today than he was back then; or that, instead dispatching Rahm to berate the Norwegians, he could have refused to accept the prize.
If he had done so, he would have imbued his presidency with the kind of moral authority even the pope would envy and placed himself in the more admirable company of just two, arguably even more transformative figures, who refused to accept (of their own volition): North Vietnamese negotiator Lu Duc Tho – who exposed the vaingloriousness of men like U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger, Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by refusing to accept a prize for negotiating a peace that had yet to materialize; and French writer John-Paul Sartre – who dismissed the prize as a self-righteous imprimatur that would undermine the integrity of his writing.
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