Is Obama’s Nobel Just to Repudiate George W. Bush?: Corriere della Sera, Italy

Americans aren’t alone in thinking that President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was nothing more than a West-European rejection of the polices of President Bush. For Italy’s Corriere della Sera, columnist Franco Venturini gives vent to his fear that this Nobel may have ben erroneously awarded:

“If not an indictment of his predecessor, what is this Nobel for Barack Obama, which has no relation to hard and fast accomplishments and isn’t to celebrate his more than credit-worthy diversity? … If that’s the way things have gone, we believe Oslo was in error. Because the decision to award Obama reveals an ideological intent, while Obama himself sums up his new policies as being bereft of an ideological bent.

“The president, at first surprised himself, perhaps provided the best interpretation of all for his award: a simple incentive to go on, an encouragement, with the unspoken hope that the Nobel doesn’t raise the bar too much and contribute to his vulnerability on the domestic front. We, too, wish to believe that this is an encouragement, and would like to associate ourselves with it. But one cannot ignore that yesterday, a new era began: that of a Nobel Prize based on trust.”

By Franco Venturini

Translated By Enrico Del Sero

October 10, 2009

Italy – Corriere della Sera – Original Article (Italian)
Defeated a few days ago in Copenhagen where he had unsuccessfully carried Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Olympics, in nearby Oslo, Barack Obama has exacted a surprising and singular revenge. Surprising because never in the post-war era has the Nobel Peace Prize been awarded to a sitting American president – to say nothing of one who has been in office for just nine months. Singular because Obama, a bearer of intentions that deserve all of our support, has yet to achieve any of them and could over the next few days, expose the paradox of a Nobel Peace Prize winner sending additional troops to fight a bloody war.

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