Speaking as a guy who prefers President Obama over anyone the increasingly deranged Republican Party has to offer, I have to say that no, he didn’t earn a Nobel. Wonkette editor emeritus Ana Marie Cox summed it up quite succinctly on Twitter: Apparently Nobel Prizes now being awarded to anyone who is not George Bush.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has this to say:
This is an odd award. You’d expect it to come later in Obama’s presidency and tied to some particular event or accomplishment. But the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the ‘hyper-power’ as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it’s a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was ‘normal history’ rather than dark aberration.
You can expect to hear much sturm und drang from the already-verging-on-deranged conservative side of the political spectrum; even among officials, the expected window of graciousness through gritted teeth has been skipped. So much for their calls for people to “Respect the Office” when their guy was in charge.
Were I in the President’s shoes, I’d say: “Thanks guys, I’m honoured, but I’m sure that there are more deserving people and I haven’t earned it…YET.”