Tag: Barack Obama

Obama’s Nobel Prize (II)

Just want to make it clear that I’m not siding with those who say President Obama should refuse the Nobel Peace Prize.

He should accept it with great humility, and make it clear that he understands it’s a goad for what he might accomplish — not a lifetime achievement award for a president who’s only been in office for nine months.

Refusing the award would merely compound the Nobel committee’s mistake with an even greater one. (Via Hub Blog, which notes that Jon Keller and David Kravitz want Obama to reject the Nobel.)

Obama’s Nobel Prize

obama_20091009I should be reading the papers and getting ready for class, but I just want to get this out there first. No doubt the topic will inspire a long string of comments, and probably a few of you will have more coherent thoughts than I do.

President Obama is a leader of extraordinary promise. I think he’s already accomplished a lot. His policies helped steer the worst economic crisis since the 1930s into something like a normal recession. He’s come closer to enacting comprehensive health-care reform than any previous president.

And, yes, his approach to foreign policy has combined pragmatism, cooperation and an orientation toward negotiation and peace that stands in stark contrast with the belligerent Bush-Cheney team. I’m also glad he’s rethinking his original desire to escalate in Afghanistan.

That said, I’m puzzled, to say the least, by his winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I think Obama might well have been Nobel-worthy in a couple of years, depending on what he’s able to accomplish with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Iran and its nuclear aspirations, with the Afghanistan-Pakistan mess and with North Korea. And that’s assuming he can find willing negotiating partners.

For the Nobel committee to award its most prestigious honor to Obama at this early stage of his presidency, the members must have been thinking one of two things:

  • He deserves it for all sorts of symbolic reasons: he’s the first African-American president, he represents a clean break with George W. Bush and he’s reached out to the international community in a variety of ways.
  • He doesn’t really deserve it, but he should get it in order to give him ammunition (oops; bad word) against his critics and to provide some momentum to his peace-making efforts.

I don’t think either of those reasons are good enough.

Conservatives, needless to say, are going to have a field day with this, comparing it to previous Nobels they think were undeserving, such as those given to Jimmy Carter and Al Gore. By contrast, I think Gore and especially Carter were very deserving recipients who received the honor on the basis of many years of hard work.

Many liberals are going to be thrilled that Obama won, although the early buzz on the left, based solely on my monitoring of Twitter, is that at least some liberals are as perplexed as I am.

Not that Obama is the worst selection ever. Certainly there have been much more undeserving recipients, such as Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger. (Despite what some conservatives are claiming on Twitter, Adolf Hitler did not win the Nobel. Try looking it up, folks.)

Anyway — there you have it. Discuss among yourselves.

No comparison

Conservative pundit Byron York has written a piece for the Washington Examiner reminding us that Democrats protested when President George H.W. Bush delivered a televised address to schoolchildren in 1991.

As described by York (and a contemporaneous New York Times account backs him up), the Democrats’ protest was deeply stupid. But, as York notes, the protests came after Bush’s speech, and were about money, not motives.

If York wants us to believe there’s any moral equivalence between what the Democrats said 18 years ago and Republican protests that President Obama would indoctrinate impressionable minds with socialist ideas, well, he’s going to have to do better than that.

Lost Will on Afghanistan

Columnist George Will today calls for the near-total withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, writing:

[F]orces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.

Will’s column is not a huge surprise — he’s been offering previews on ABC’s “This Week.” His assessment matters because of his status as a conservative icon, although, as a traditional conservative rather than a neocon, he was never as gung-ho about war in the Middle East as, say, William Kristol.

Giving Will’s views even more resonance is an especially bleak assessment by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the American commander in Afghanistan, who is calling for a far greater commitment of U.S. forces.

President Obama faces an incredibly difficult dilemma. He campaigned on a platform of shifting resources from Iraq to the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan, arguing that the move was necessary to deny Al Qaeda a refuge. Yet that’s a dubious proposition, given that Al Qaeda could move anywhere. Indeed, the only reason it’s in Afghanistan is because it was chased out of Sudan.

But before you say we should let Afghanistan go, remember that Pakistan is unstable and armed with nuclear weapons.

Is Will right? I don’t know. I do know that if Obama can meet American security needs without putting American troops in harm’s way, then he should do so as quickly as possible.

Looks like we’re back in Kansas, Toto

Oh, my. A first-term Republican congresswoman from Kansas named Lynn Jenkins told folks attending a town meeting recently that her party needs to find a “great white hope” to do battle with President Obama. According to the Topeka Capital-Journal, Jenkins told the crowd:

Republicans are struggling right now to find the great white hope. I suggest to any of you who are concerned about that, who are Republican, there are some great young Republican minds in Washington.

Jenkins proceeded to rattle off the names of several Republican up-and-comers, all of whom were, uh, white. She later apologized through a spokeswoman.

Sounds like the classic definition of a gaffe. That is, she accidentally said what she meant. As Charles Pierce observes, when they say it’s not about race, it’s about race. (Via TPMDC.)

Spying on the antiwar movement

In my latest for the Guardian, I take a look at a disturbing, underreported revelation: that a public-records request in Washington State revealed an antiwar activist was, in fact, a military spy whose activities may have been a violation of federal law. And I argue that President Obama can no longer ignore calls to investigate the Bush-Cheney White House.

A couple of Gates-related odds and ends

I want to make it clear right up front that I know neither of these tidbits speaks directly to the matter of Professor Henry Louis Gates versus Sgt. James Crowley. But I’ve been thinking about both of them, and have decided they’re worth passing on as being indicative of a certain cultural mindset.

First, can we agree that 1999 wasn’t that long ago? Good. Because it was during that year that the Cambridge Chronicle discovered the Cambridge Police Department was training its officers to believe Mexicans and members of other ethnic groups who routinely eat spicy foods were immune to pepper spray. Apologies ensued.

Second, why on earth would Crowley give his first major interview to John Dennis and Gerry Callahan on WEEI Radio (AM 850)? The officer was trying to make the case that he’s not a racist — and yet he talked with two guys who were once suspended for comparing black kids to “gorillas.”

I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that Crowley is a racist. On the other hand, the evidence that he’s “clueless,” as Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker put it yesterday, continues to build.

As for President Obama, his week was like the Red Sox’ — really bad, ending on an upbeat note, but leaving you wondering whether he can shore up some fundamental flaws (lack of message discipline, combined with a disconcerting habit of having to revise his remarks) that weren’t evident when he was winning.

Obama, Gates and racism

President Obama stepped on his health-care message last night when he said more about the Henry Louis Gates arrest than he should have — especially since, as he himself admitted, he didn’t know the facts.

But critics who tut-tut whenever Obama reminds us that he is indeed an African-American who has experienced his share of racism might want to consider the debilitating effects of crap like this and this.