What? Obama for This Year’s Nobel Peace Prize?

Who is not stunned by the news, announced within the past hour, that the Nobel Committee has awarded its annual peace prize to President Barack Obama? (Obama himself must be astonished.) Digesting the story is hard. Lech Walesa, who won the prize in 1983, expressed the views of many when he asked, “Who? What? So Fast?”

Here at home, right-wingers are sure to fall to the ground in spasms of vitriolic outrage, while left-wingers will whine on talk shows that Obama has yet to make health care free or reverse global warming. Centrists (are there any left?) won’t have anything to offer other than to wonder why he isn’t more effective at pushing a recalcitrant Congress into behaving like adults instead of toddlers.

The Committee observed Obama’s “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” It added that Obama has “created a new international climate.”

Effort? Climate? Since when are prizes given out for trying? The Committee’s decision is akin to a professor deciding to suddenly award grades based not on merit, but on the subjective judgment that this or that student is “trying.”

And yet it’s not at all akin to this. The decision by the Nobel Committee is political in the profoundest sense of the word. In “Nobel speak,” they admitted as much. Said Thorbjorn Jagland, the Committee’s Chair, “We are not awarding the prize for what may happen in the future but for what he has done in the previous year. We would hope this will enhance what he is trying to do.” Where I come from, of course, their decision is called “choosing both.” From where they stand, it’s something entirely different.

Aristotle, in arguing that man was a political animal, considered the end of a state to be the “human good.” This idea no longer resonates with most of us. Few think in the terms of the Ancients — where the community, or the whole, takes precedence over the individual, or the part. Stuck in Machiavellian/Hobbesian/Lockian ideas that begin with “each man is out for himself” — and more or less end there — we moderns have failed to do what the Nobel Committee has done, which is to see the real Obama for who he is and what he’s trying to do.

Obama’s background in community organizing was not a preface to his political career. Nor does it constitute background material to understanding the man or his political character. Instead, it’s the very heart of the Obama matter. As a political leader, his moves are unclear and puzzling to almost everyone. In not advancing the rights of any single group of individuals, or in promoting the rights of individuals in general, Obama disappoints many who supported him during the campaign. It turns out they saw in him merely what they projected onto him. Yet their projections were only that — projections. Disappointments in the president, at this point, do not amount to failures on his part.

Moreover, many of the yammering commentators who ceaselessly analyze Obama’s decisions seem oblivious to the President’s deeply political nature. In particular, where they see stumbling, or ineffectiveness, political adroitness is often at work. In dismissing Obama as a man of style rather than substance, or stuck in the false politics of “hope,” or worse, in seeing him as a product of the “Chicago street,” commentators left and right fail to see that Obama is the most profoundly political president of all the presidents we have seen in our lifetime.

In awarding the Nobel Peace prize to President Obama, a small but powerful group of judges from outside America, who wield an awful lot of power, has dismissed measuring the accomplishments of the present as a standard for success as part of the old way of doing things. They’ve decided to act according to new standards, whereby the world as a whole must be considered. In choosing Barack Obama for this distinguished prize, the Nobel Committee is saying that we are all at a perilous moment where what we do within the next five to ten years will save or destroy the very future of our planet.

The Nobel Committee’s decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama, in the profoundest sense of the word, was political.