In the unlikely event that reading my blog is the first thing you're doing after emerging from a lengthy coma, let me say welcome back and tell you that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize last Friday. This award, surprising even to its recipient, was met with very mixed reactions, which is perfectly understandable and completely appropriate under the circumstance. It was also met with grossly inappropriate though utterly predictable rage and scorn from the legion of people who have been afflicted with a particularly virulent strain of white hot hatred for President Obama and all that he represents. The fair and arguably correct criticism of the award is that President Obama has not yet done anything worthy of the prize. With respect to the haters, had President Obama discovered a way for cars to run on household garbage and emit no pollution, simultaneously solving our landfill problem and our dependence on foreign oil, they would only scream about how he just ruined America by costing us jobs in both the sanitation and petroleum industries.
While those who believe that the Peace Prize should have been given to someone more deserving have a persuasive argument, I can also see some merit in the committee's decision and give it the benefit of the doubt. America's shift from a country with a foreign policy endorsed by the, "Nuke 'em 'til they glow then shoot 'em in the dark" set to a country that wants a leader who favors diplomacy, respect and understanding is an enormous boon to world peace. The United States' only peer in terms of military spending and might is the rest of the word combined. This brings us to "American exceptionalism." President Obama's foes, primarily the haters but also some reasonable thinkers who simply disagree with him, rail against his failure to preach American exceptionalism, and they bristle when he dares to suggest that we lack godlike infallibility. They want the president to be the equivalent of the unfit parent who swears that his or her child is never wrong and every conflict must therefore be someone else's fault. Ironically, Obama's Nobel Prize can be defended from either side of the American exceptionalism discussion. Simply because a U.S president can do more to alter the course of world peace than any other leader (American exceptionalism), President Obama's inauguration was a monumental event, particularly given his appetite for diplomacy and nuclear disarmament. At the same time, exceptional or not, he refuses to make jingoistic arrogance the centerpiece of his foreign policy, which is also a giant leap towards global peace.
If a research biologist uncovered an extremely promising cure for cancer, leaving the medical community giddy with excitement and landing the discovery on the cover of every news magazine, that scientist would be a slam dunk for the Nobel Prize in Medicine even before a single human patient had been cured. Yes, the discovery is itself an achievement and I'm not arguing that it's perfectly analogous to President Obama's Peace Prize, but it would still be an award based its promise of a yet unrealized benefit. Moreover, there is precedent for the Peace Prize to be awarded based on hope for the future as opposed to a completed accomplishment. Finally, the political right can't simultaneously argue that President Obama has ruined America by doing this, that and the other in his foreign policy and that he has not yet done anything. It seems to me that either he's done something or he's done nothing. If these critics are to avoid being dismissed out of hand, they must be consistent and not let their hatred contradict itself.
