THE DAILY BLADE: Nobel Committee: All Politics Is International
On the heels of President Barack Hussein Obama being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a new Rasmussen national telephone survey of American adults conducted Friday and Saturday nights finds that 58 percent believe politics plays a role in the awarding of the Nobel Prize, up 18 points from a year ago. When the results are broken down by party affiliation, 76 percent of Repubs and 66 percent of independents think the awards are political, whereas Dems are evenly split on the question.
Whether Americans were as acutely aware of it as they became after Obama’s unearned award, “the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee … has throughout its history been captive to the politics of the time,” reports The Wall Street Journal, which dubbed this year’s choice as “the world's first futures prize in diplomacy”:
In October 1989, for example, with China's Tiananmen Square uprising still fresh, the committee announced it was awarding the prize to Beijing's nemesis, the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. It was, ostensibly, recognition of the Dalai Lama's struggle against more than 30 years of Chinese occupation - but also a slap at Beijing. …
In the early part of this decade, some of the committee's citations became pointedly aimed at the George W. Bush administration. In 2002, it gave the peace prize to former President Jimmy Carter. In praising Mr. Carter's lifetime of work on peace and social justice issues, committee member Gunnar Berge made reference to the fact that the U.S. government was fighting in Afghanistan and gearing up for war in Iraq at the time. …
The committee followed in 2005 with Mohamed El Baradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the organization at odds with the Bush administration over the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In 2007, it picked Democrat Al Gore, the man Mr. Bush had narrowly defeated in the 2000 election, for his work on climate change.
Some believe that the astonishing choice of Obama this year was meant as the Nobel committee’s fourth smack upside his predecessor’s head. But there’s something else going on here: Rather than thinking of America as first among nations, Obama believes we are just one of many nations, and the Nobel committee wants to promote the demise of American exceptionalism by encouraging Obama’s internationalism.
The Intellectual Activist editor Robert Tracinski sees the Nobel committee’s choice as “an attempt … to play on Obama's vanity in order to influence his decisions on Iran and Afghanistan. … In appealing to Obama's moral vanity, they know their man well - and it will probably work.”
Obama’s promise of a humbler America has the envious and the enemy alike eagerly anticipating the prospect of a humbled America.
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