WASHINGTON — He’s the Nobel Peace Prize winner who just ordered 30,000 more troops to war. He’s the laureate who says he doesn’t deserve the award. He’s not quite 11 months on the job and already in the company of Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama.
This is President Barack Obama’s Nobel moment, an immense honor shadowed by awkward timing.
When Obama leaves for Oslo, Norway, on Wednesday to be lauded for his style of international diplomacy, he goes knowing that the American people are more concerned about something else: peace of mind.
The economy has left millions of them hurting. The mood of the country is dispirited — more people than not think the nation is going in the wrong direction — and soothing news is tough to find. Unemployment is in double digits even as the bleeding of jobs has slowed.
Meanwhile, the memory is only days old of Obama’s address at West Point, N.Y., where he told Army cadets and the rest of the world that he was escalating the war in Afghanistan to stabilize it and then try to end it.
All that is the backdrop for the imagery the world is about to see: an American president to be toasted for peace, awarded a storied Nobel medal, treated to a torch-lit procession and feted at a banquet filled with people in tuxedos and gowns.
The reaction back home could be delicate. A Gallup poll after Obama won the award in October found 61 percent of Americans did not think he deserved it.
This could be a moment of American pride, but the White House reaction has been restrained. Obama will be in and out of Oslo in about a day.
As for the award, Obama says it’s not really about him.
On the morning eight weeks ago when the news caught the world by surprise, Obama called it an affirmation of American leadership “on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.”
But the Nobel committee says the award is, in fact, about Obama.
The reaction was so loud — joyous, critical, bewildered — that panel members broke their usual silence to defend their unanimous selection.
“Alfred Nobel wrote that the prize should go to the person who has contributed most to the development of peace in the previous year,” said the committee chairman, Thorbjorn Jagland. “Who has done more for that than Barack Obama?”
In choosing Obama, the panel cited his work toward a world free of nuclear weapons, for a more engaged U.S. role in combating global warming, for his support of the United Nations and multilateral diplomacy, and for broadly capturing the attention of the world and giving its people “hope.”
Clearly, the award meant to promote those efforts as much as reward them. Obama was in office 12 days when the nomination deadline hit. He was in office less than nine months when he was named a Nobel laureate.
