Obama Nobel Unites Right, Left
If this were a Hollywood movie, I think this is the part where they buzz Central Casting for one Barack Hussein Obama.
You mean the guy adored by the left and despised by the right? The transformational one whose election turned Oprah and Glenn Beck all weepy for different reasons? He who sent a thrill up Chris Matthews' leg and caused Rush Limbaugh's head to explode on air?
The same.
So it was that after the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee announced its decision to award the president the Peace Prize for 2009, both ends of the political spectrum reacted with a collective "Huh?"
For once, it seemed, both left and right were on the same page. It was one of those once-in-a-generation moments, sort of like Halley's Comet, but let's not push the analogy too far. Democrats and Republicans smirked when they heard that Mr. Obama had received this highest of honors after just nine months of limited achievement. But they had sharply different interpretations about why it was undeserved.
The major point of agreement: the award had less to do with recognizing any breakthrough foreign policy achievements than it did with the fact that Mr. Obama was not George W. Bush. When it comes to articulating the United States' proper role in the world, however, that's where the rift comes into full view.
First, the lefties. For them, the president's handling of foreign affairs remains, at best, a work in progress. Even before the inauguration, they invested high - and perhaps unrealistic - hope in Mr. Obama. They expected that his election would herald a clean break with the Bush administration's foreign policy and a return to the foreign policy consensus which dominated most of the post-World War II era. It's a mixed record. While the Obama team has talked a good game - they get much better grades than the Bushies in the "Plays Well With Others" column - some of the administration's policies still bear an uncomfortable resemblance to policies set down by the Bush administration.
For instance, the president speaks eloquently about human rights but he still decided to postpone a meeting with the Dalai Lama until he visits Chinese President Hu Jintao in Beijing in November. Chalk it up to realpolitik, but President Obama disappointed some supporters. Ditto for Afghanistan, where the President may eventually decide he needs to send more troops.
Mr. Obama has also left the Democratic base frustrated at the pace of change on civil liberties issues, such as rendition, electronic surveillance, indefinite detention, and the closure of Guantanamo. The bluntest formulation of their disappointment was set forth by NewStatesman's Mehdi Hassan who, fresh from writing a cover story on the morphing of the president into "Barack W. Bush," asked whether the Nobel announcement was "a joke."
For Andrew Leonard, the Nobel committee had more to do with the hopes for change that Mr. Obama has stirred abroad. "Perhaps the best case that can be made for this award," he wrote, "is that billions of people around the world seem to feel a lot better since Obama's election as President of the United States - at least as judged by the enormous rise in positive attitudes about the U.S. measured by international pollsters."
There's no such ambivalence about Obama from the right. When it came to grading the president's handling of foreign affairs, they give him a big fat D (no surprise there). From Mr. Obama's first days in the White House, conservatives have objected to the decision to seek greater global consensus. They argued that any retreat from a belief in American exceptionalism hands victory to the "blame America" crowd, at home and abroad.
All the more reason for their consternation at the Nobel committee's decision to select the president as this year's winner. Unlike liberals, however, they dismissed this as a laughable concession to a cult of personality where speechifying is a substitute for substance. Writing in RedState.com, Dan McLaughlin referred to the award as "a Nobel Prize only Andrew Sullivan could love."
Ouch.
In The New Ledger, Benjamin Kerstein took an even dimmer view of the Nobel committee, concluding with this zinger:
"The sight of a committee of diplomats reducing themselves to a blubbering gaggle of loons in the hopes of propping up a ludicrous mediocrity is momentarily hilarious, and the upcoming uninhibited goonery from Obama's admirers threatens to outdo even this, but it is also somewhat sobering ... Obama and Obamamania are a joke that, in the end, is also on us."
Oddly enough, not a peep out of conservatives about the juxtaposition of giving a prize that honors peace to a politician who is ramping up a military occupation of a foreign country (see the CBSNews.com story on Friday, "Obama, War Council Discuss Troop Levels"). Or the fact that federal spending on the U.S. military is more than the spending of the next 45 countries combined, according to GlobalIssues.org.