UPDATE BELOW:
So, in the 36 hours or so since the world found out that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, we have been reading, hearing, talking, and writing about the seemingly near-universal feeling of disbelief, leading to various degrees of displeasure for many, that he was nominated for the award only two weeks after he was inaugurated, and won it after only nine months in office.
That response is so widespread that I became curious to know what the dissenters are saying — dissenters in this context being those who believe Pres. Obama was an appropriate choice for the Peace Prize, and think he deserved to win. I am not referring here to the official responses from Democratic leaders — I mean, whatever their private opinions might be, one would expect Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, et al., to be unreservedly enthusiastic in their public statements. But what about media pundits, bloggers, and others such-like?
Joan Walsh was just as flummoxed as everyone else initially, but the merit of the decision grew on her (my emphasis):
In recent years the Nobel Peace Prize has more often honored promise and encouraged progress than it marked concrete, permanent achievements in the realm of world peace. So the prize went to President Carter’s ultimately unsuccessful 1978 Middle East peace drive; and to the same still uncompleted effort by Yassir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in 1994. In 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi won the prize in her jail cell, but the point was to support democracy in Burma (and 18 years later, she is still under house arrest).Thinking about the Northern Ireland Catholic and Protestant “Peace Mothers” who won the award in 1976, years before real peace accords, I suddenly saw Obama’s win as strangely humble, and personal: One man trying to reverse the bloody tide of recent American history.
Obama’s prize is a measure of how far the Bush administration pushed the United States, and the world, away from peace. So far away that Obama’s small but fervent efforts in the opposite direction — new diplomacy on Israel, Palestine, Iran, Russia and North Korea; slow but steady withdrawal from Iraq and now a painful reappraisal of the increasingly bloody war in Afghanistan; a pledge to eliminate nuclear weapons; new initiatives to the Muslim world — could win him this prize. …
And the derision from the right? Forget about it, Walsh advises:
The right-wing’s idiocy about Obama’s Nobel win is no longer even interesting. … The country will move on without them. I loved what French President Nicholas Sarkozy (not always an Obama fan) said about why the U.S. president really got the Nobel Peace Prize: “The award marks America’s return to the heart of the people of the world.” That deserves a prize.
Rachel Maddow argued forcefully in the “Mind Over Chatter” segment of her MSNBC show last night that Pres. Obama deserved to win the Prize (h/t, ePluribus Media). As she so often does, Maddow effectively demolished every single reason Obama’s detractors have given for why he should not have gotten it. I urge you to watch it for yourself (below), because any summary of her argument that I could make will fall short.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMJuEOaF84o&feature=player_embedded#
Via James Fallows comes the Ignorance Is Bliss Award — or to paraphrase Fallows, the Google Is Your Friend Award:
The Washington Post’s lead editorial today argues that a more deserving winner for the Nobel Peace Prize would have been Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose death during the Iranian uprising became a worldwide symbol, comparable to the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Defensible point, though obviously purely symbolic in its own way too. As the paper says, after arguing that the selection of Barack Obama is an expression of hope rather than a post-achievement recognition:
“The Nobel Committee’s decision is especially puzzling given that a better alternative was readily apparent…. A posthumous award for Neda, as the avatar of a democratic movement in Iran, would have recognized the sacrifices that movement has made and encouraged its struggle in a dark hour.”
Would it have been so hard to mention the complicating fact that Nobel prizes are only for still-living people? And that this is a basic element of discussion when, for example, the literature prize rolls around each year? (After John Updike’s death in January, one of the Post’s own writers noted that among the sadnesses was that Updike would never be recognized with a Nobel prize.) And that therefore the omission of Neda is not “especially puzzling” at all? The FAQ page at NobelPrize.org (yes! there is such a site) makes this clear:
“Is it possible to nominate someone for a posthumous Nobel Prize?
“No, it is not. Previously, a person could be awarded a prize posthumously if he/she had already been nominated (before February 1 of the same year), which was true of Erik Axel Karlfeldt (Nobel Prize in Literature 1931) and Dag Hammarskjöld (Nobel Peace Prize, 1961). Effective from 1974, the prize may only go to a deceased person to whom it was already awarded (usually in October) but who had died before he/she could receive the Prize on December 10 (William Vickrey, 1996 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). See also par. 4 of the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation.”
And this paragraph is the very first thing that comes up on a Google search for “posthumous Nobel prize.” According to Google’s meter, it took 0.24 seconds to find that info, and it would have taken maybe another fifteen seconds to change the sentence in the editorial to say: “Although the Nobel committee ordinarily rules out posthumous awards, an exception in this case… [and make the argument].”
Nice to see the WaPo still striving for those high journalistic standards.
UPDATE: JustOneMinute’s Tom Maguire brings up another teeny-tiny problem with Fred Hiatt’s recommendation: Neda Agha-Soltan was killed in the aftermath of the Iranian elections, which took place in June 2009 — and the deadline for the Nobel Peace Prize nominations was February 1, 2009.
PAST CONTRIBUTOR.