Posted By BillHeise on October 10, 2009

My good friend Jim Marchand used to say that he was waiting for the Nobel committee to call and award him his long-delayed Prize. They never did. After yesterday’s surprise, I hope he realizes what an idealistic body that committee is. Even my friends and fellow bloggers at the Huffington Post quail at the choice to award to a man who served in the US Senate for less than 180 days before deciding to run for president.

Michael Russnow is angry, writing

Obama’s designation is akin to giving an Oscar to a young director for films we hope that he or she will produce or for a first-time published author getting a Pulitzer for a book he is destined to write some day.

But other reactions from Huffington Post bloggers give us a sense of Barack Obama is the vessel of the hopes of people, rather than the fulfillment of those hopes:

Frances Beinecke: After eight costly years of inaction, the United States has begun to lead. Since taking office, Obama has moved quickly to put climate change near the top of his agenda.

Michael Moore: Freedom can not be delivered from the front seat of someone else’s Humvee. You have to end our involvement in Afghanistan now. If you don’t, you’ll have no choice but to return the prize to Oslo.

Robert Fuller: Obama got the prize not for doing, but for being. Not for making peace, but for exemplifying something new on the world stage — the politics of dignity.

Sarah Lovinger: Today’s announcement that President Obama won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize not only strengthened the peace process, it also benefited human health worldwide.

Taylor Marsh: Beyond the Bush tailspin, why was Obama awarded the Nobel? For his outreach to the Muslim community, his charge on nuclear nonproliferation, and his determination to help Afghans help themselves.

John Prendergast: Peace activists are hoping that President Obama, with the added luster of a Nobel Prize, will wade more deeply into resolving the conflicts in Sudan and the Congo, the deadliest in the world.

Mike Hegedus: Barack Obama won the Nobel Prize because the world outside our own borders hopes, wants, and prays for his success internationally.

Nancy Snow: The prize places this very new American president in the position of herculean expectations to fulfill his vision that the world might live together peaceably in a nuclear-free environment.

This puts a large burden on the president to perform according to our expectations of him. He can continue to be all things to all people as long as he does not express himself completely on any subject. It was on account of these vague expectations that he was elected. It is his idealism that people, both on the Nobel committee and off, admire or despise him for. The problem with idealism is that idealists have to operate within the world just like the rest of us. They have to make choices, and as they make choices that will inevitably disappoint some people.

Obama has continued as long as possible in campaign mode, promising everything to everybody but delivering very little, as Fred Armisen’s SNL sketch last week showed.

It will not be enough to put the burden on people like Rush Limbaugh and the Congressional Republicans if he fails, although bloggers like Lisa Gans would like to think so. She writes: “For those who wish to undermine the president, this award will prove a fertile talking point for raising questions about whether he will prove to be more about optics or substance.” The question is not one of optics or substance. He has substance, but his substance is grounded in his idealism; and idealism has some serious weaknesses on its own when pursued at a strategy for governing. If he fails, his failures will fall on Obama himself. This is the risk he takes in running as an idealist and continuing to govern from an idealistic point of view.

He has already begun to disappoint some of those who placed more value on his realistic commitment to certain agenda points than he, perhaps, intended. As blogger John Aravosis notes: “President Obama will speak Saturday night at the Human Rights Campaign national dinner. The big question in gay-land is what will Obama say. I fear the answer is: Not much.”

The Nobel Peace Prize will, I suspect, haunt him more than it will help them for the rest of his presidency.

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