Peace? We are still in Iraq and Obama is increasing the involvement in Afghanistan.
Hope? For the real-life people, hope is a rare commodity. For those of you that point to (IMO questionable) numbers and want to claim the economy is improving, please discuss your view with those that lost their unemployment benefits this week or try to sell your house or try to buy a house or look for a new job.
Togetherness? The mid-term voter would rather have wacky-ass teapartiers than Democrats.
I would really like to hear the rationale anyone can give that Obama’s NPP has been justified by the last 18 months.
I didn’t think he really deserved it in at-the-time-sight.
You appear to be under the misapprehension, however, that the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by American voters. Or Americans, for that matter. Perhaps you should read up on it a bit and try again.
I would say that his award of the Peace Prize was certainly… premature. I don’t think anything that’s happened in the last year or so has altered that view.
But let’s get this straight: the Peace Prize isn’t intended to be a popularity contest for the American voter. The state of the economy and how many tea party candidates were elected to Congress is completely irrelevant to the question.
ETA: Wow, now that’s a simulpost. With simulcontent.
IMO, no. But I didn’t think he deserved it then either. I seriously doubt that he will do anything to deserve it during his administration and I am an ardent supporter.
I do think that the jury is still out on Al Gore and his prize.
Most people agreed at the time that the award was premature, and that it was given as an encouragement rather than a recognition of his achievements. I think coming to a conclusion about whether or not it was deserved a year later is also premature.
They didn’t give him a prize for inspiring hope.
That’s a very inaccurate summary of the midterms, and it has nothing to do with the Nobel prize. They did not give him the prize based on what they thought would happen in the midterms in 2010.
The act of keeping Sarah Palin from getting anywhere near the Oval Office was, in itself, tanatmount to saving the planet, so yes, even if he never accomplishes anything else, he deserved it.
The we won’t have to worry about Peace anymore anyways? :dubious:
Obviously the award was dubious from the start. Of course, the first item listed was about nuclear reductions, and he did help negotiate a new START treaty - not that it’ll matter much if the GOP won’t help get it approved.
The rest of the committee’s rationale was aspirational at best.
One opinion I’ve seen is that he was given the prize essentially for not being Bush or, to a lesser extent, McCain. To that end, while he definitely isn’t either of them, some of the defining policies of the Bush administration are still in place. To some extent, Bush was so reviled by so much of the rest of the world that by virtue of not being him he has increased international diplomacy and cooperation. To that extent, it is true, but it seems awfully shaky to me.
Regardless, it seems to me that the main purpose is that they perceived that he was improving diplomacy, correctly or not, and they wanted to encourage that. If they genuinely believed that to be true and they genuinely believed that awarding the prize would encourage it further, then he deserved it. However, asking whether he still deserves it in that context barely over a year later is awfully premature because we really can’t see the effects of his diplomatic policies until at least near the end of his first term, but likely even years after. And, even then, I think it’s only meaningful in comparison to how someone else, McCain, might have handled the same situation.
We have to remember, Obama was a brand new shining star on the world stage, so he really did look like he might be bringing in a new order of international relations. A lot of that hype has died down since then. I do think our international relations have improved over the last two, but I’m unsure just how much of that is due to his actions and not because of other events that he has no control over.
I think it was a purely political move. The Nobel committee was doing what it could to give Obama even more heft and gravitas because they thought he was going to do things that they approved of.
And now it turns out that he basically affirmed pretty much every Bush foreign policy initiative, maintained Bush’s Iraq timeline, doubled down in Afghanistan, ordered the extrajudicial execution of an American citizen, failed to maintain Bush’s leadership in Africa, and Wikileaks has unveiled numerous embarrassing things about his State Department, including Hillary Clinton.
He promised transparency and a halt to the increase of executive power, but once in power he became even more secretive than Bush and claimed even more executive privilege. His various gaffes and failed diplomatic efforts have reduced America’s standing, and he is routinely rebuffed or ignored at international conferences.
So no, he didn’t deserve his Nobel prize. Nor did it have the effect the Nobel committee hoped it would. In fact, its obvious political motivation may have blown back in Obama’s face and contributed to his downfall in popularity.
I don’t think there’s necessarily a problem with awarding the Nobel Peace Prize proactively, particularly if they believe that it will help encourage a laudible goal. The problem with awarding it to Obama was that he hadn’t yet lived down his hype, and so it seems to me as though it was rewarded more on hype that he could do these things rather than on a belief, absent that hype, that he could accomplish those goals.