Pufferfish

A Nobel Peace Prize Is A 'Potential Political Liability'?

I think the blog master has done a pretty good job providing a brief run down of the absurdity coming from some of the D.C. high schoolers regarding Prez O's Nobel Peace Prize. But a friend passed along an item that I think takes the gold medal for the cacophony that's coming from the Village* on this. To wit, the New York Times:

For Mr. Obama, at 48 one of the nation’s youngest presidents, the award is an extraordinary recognition that puts him in the company of world leaders such as Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who won for helping to bring an end to the cold war, and Nelson Mandela, who sought an end to apartheid. But it is also a potential political liability at home; already, Republicans are criticizing the president, contending he won more for his “star power” than his actual achievements.

NO!!! No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no...NO!! There is NO WAY that winning a prize for waging peace CAN EVER be a political liability, at home or abroad. Nor can it "potentially" be a liability as the Times couched it. Listen kids, just because the jocks on the football team (i.e. whiney GOPers) say there's something wrong with being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, doesn't necessarily mean that it's true, or could be true in the future. And just because said jocks are crying about something doesn't mean there's something worth crying about. I think a commenter from this article sums it up quite nicely:

Only in the United States media would winning the Nobel Peace Prize be automatically followed by "and it's a potential political liability". He won the Nobel Prize, it's not even a question of cutting him some slack, he won the Nobel Prize.

Dude won a prize. That's all. It's good. Leave it at that.

* Note: D.C. High, D.C. high schoolers, the Village, Villagers = same, same.

But What Have You Done For Me Lately

Here's a few examples of our pundits dropping Beltway-addled knowledge. First up, Anna Marie Cox:

Apparently Nobel prizes now being awarded to anyone who is not George Bush.

John Dickerson:

The committee of five Norwegians has a more relaxed standard than Saturday Night Live, which recently poked fun at Obama for his lack of accomplishments, and Arizona State University, which declined to award him an honorary degree because of his inexperience.

Marc Ambinder:

This tracks with one argument I'm hearing and reading from Democrats and others who are skeptical of the prize: it will turn the volume and enthusiasm level all the way to the extreme end of the dial for conservatives -- overmodulating at 110%; the resulting hyperpolarization will hurt Obama's agenda.

Joe Klein:

If he doesn't provide results that justify the award, this Nobel will prove a millstone come election time.

These guys are asking the president to justify himself like they never did when Bush was selling the Iraq War.

In our current media culture of opportunistic skepticism, Obama winning the Nobel Prize and thus having the will of the American people honored is fodder for petulant commentary. This idea that this award is emboldening the right isn't an indication of anything except their own detachment.

Obama is the leader of the free world. For all the masturbatory conservative rhetoric paid to our own exceptionalism you'd think it would make sense that such a profound change in posture and decency ushered in by Obama might also carry with it a tremendous influence on global culture. For the Cairo and Wright speeches alone he deserves mad props. Add to that banning the use of torture (hello!), reducing troops in Iraq, scrapping the defense shield in Europe and bringing Russia to the table in negotiations with Iran and you're looking at some serious substance.

The change in perception a black guy with a funny name preaching an ideology of tolerance and community does for a world power that was previously run by oil pimps who dabbled in wars for profit is apparently seen as a big deal abroad. Go figure. As Shimon Peres says while congratulating Obama, "Very few leaders if at all were able to change the mood of the entire world in such a short while with such a profound impact." For once it seems Americans haven't taken enough stock in their own importance.

One last bit; I haven't seen anyone rebut this narrow-mindedness better than Josh Marshall so I'll let him have some run:

This is an odd award. You'd expect it to come later in Obama's presidency and tied to some particular event or accomplishment. But the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the 'hyper-power' as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it's a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was 'normal history' rather than dark aberration.

And The Winner Is...

Uh, I have a feeling Rush and Hannity aren't going to handle this well:

In a stunning surprise, the Nobel Committee announced Friday that it had awarded its annual peace prize to President Obama 'for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples' less than nine months after he took office...

“The question we have to ask is who has done the most in the previous year to enhance peace in the world,” Mr. Jagland said. “And who has done more than Barack Obama?”

He compared the selection of Mr. Obama with the award in 1971 to the then West German Chancellor Willy Brandt for his “Ostpolitik” policy of reconciliation with communist eastern Europe.

“Brandt hadn’t achieved much when he got the prize, but a process had started that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall,” said Mr. Jagland. “The same thing is true of the prize to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, for launching perestroika. One can say that Barack Obama is trying to change the world, just as those two personalities changed Europe.”

“We have to get the world on the right track again,” he said. Without referring specifically to the Bush era, he continued: “Look at the level of confrontation we had just a few years ago. Now we get a man who is not only willing but probably able to open dialogue and strengthen international institutions.”

Say, you don't think this has anything to do with Obama doing away with the Bush Doctrine, do ya?

With predictable brain-dead analysis, Mark Halperin has already taken time to speculate on Morning Joe that this is an attempt by the Nobel Committee to undermine Obama's options with Iran. And David Gregory chimed in that the Nobel Committee was "clearly left-leaning" -- thus insinuating "peace" is not right-leaning.

The obvious lesson, as with the Olympics inanity, is that international politics and a broader context is simply out of the depth of our press corps. Everything is covered from the narrow perspective of red-blue politics without even the slightest consideration for forces that extend beyond the Beltway. The xenophobia and fear of multiculturalism already dripping from the tongues of these myopic pundits (and the reality-impaired conservatives sure to follow) is sadly expected. These fools don't have a clue who else should have received the honor. But they'll gladly tear down their own president for having the audacity to spread the hope for peace while siding against wars of opportunity and arrogant antagonism.

It's going to be a lot of fun keeping track of the right-wing freak out. Here's an early entry for meltdown of the day:

Unfortunately, this inexperienced, indecisive, ineffectual jerk doesn't seem to speak for America. And that's his real problem in the end. At this rate, the man is going to become reviled by a majority of the American people in four years.

About Last Night

It seems not everyone was bulled over by Obama's presser:

Through most of his inaugural primetime press conference, Barack Obama seemed like he was channeling a particularly loquacious combination of Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, and the ghost of Hubert Humphrey. The president's response to the first question from the Associated Press about the risks of sounding too apocalyptic about the economy ran (or, to be more accurate, crawled) for nearly 1,200 words.

....What Obama was decidedly not Monday night was Kennedy-esque. When JFK unveiled the live presidential primetime press conference 48 years ago, he answered 37 questions in the space of 40 minutes; Obama only half-responded to 13 questions in the space of an hour....As a result, the reporters and their questions were little more than potted palms as President Obama declaimed from the East Room.

Well, hmm. I have to admit, being a liberal elitist I rather like my answers long and nuanced. And I certianly prefer that to being machine-gunned with incoherent ramblings and false bravado. Bring it on. Dead or Alive. Mission Accomplished. With us or against us. Old Europe. Brevity is not always the soul of wit. In the case of the previous guy, it clearly showed he was hiding something. That something is the incovenient truth that he's an idiot. With Obama, last night was a tutorial. Yes, he treated the press like pupils in his Constitutional Law class. But he spoke - he speaks - with edible language. People understand what he's saying, even when he's talking about exceptionally complicated things. That's a talent rarely found. It's why he's president. More importantly, I took heart that our president was mocking the GOP over the idea that funding schools or improving health care was some sort of nefarious plot to destroy the country. It's about time our president did that.

Rope-A-Dope

It's amazing what a Gallup poll and some highlight worthy quotes from Obama can do for the narrative; suddenly it's Obama who is calling the shots:

Here’s what I’d guess is likely to happen over the next few days: The conference committee tasked with ironing out differences between the House and Senate stimulus bills will undo most of the roughly $65 billion in cuts to state aid, education, and health care spending the Senate centrists negotiated. To pay for it, they’ll junk the $70-billion in Alternative Minimum Tax relief the Senate showered on the upper-middle class.

Republicans will protest that Obama and Congressional Democrats have trampled on the Senate compromise and unilaterally re-imposed their liberal priorities. They’ll sprinkle in a collection of shopworn clichés, like “behind closed doors,” and “dead of night.” But, in the end, it won’t matter. The media, having already proclaimed Obama the Beltway’s only bona fide bipartisan, is hardly going to rewrite the narrative at this late stage.  And no senator who voted for the bill in the first time around is going to want to explain why he or she suddenly became “anti-job.”

I'm not so sure Obama deftely planned this, rope-a-dope style, letting the Republicans tire themselves with their own stupidity, or if he reacted to the way things were headed and realized it was time to get involved. I'm thinking it's more of the latter. Either way, there's no denying that Obama's popular right now and when he decides to kick it in gear, he can command the will of the public. Sure, I wish it happened a little sooner, but at this point it looks like the delay has boomeranged around to help Obama. He's got the wind at his back.

It's Like These Guys Take Pride In Being Ignorant

The campaign never stops. President Obama should keep that in mind and keep candidate Obama close by. Obama maintained relative silence for a couple weeks and then stepped up last night and went a long way in reminding everyone why he's a cut above. Candidate Obama simply works over the GOP like Apollo Creed in his prime. And he certainly can handle the verbal diarrhea that was served up by McCain earlier today. Memo to the perpetrator of this crass ugliness: dude, you lost. You lost bad. Your proposal is exactly what we shouldn't be doing.

(H/T Coates)

In Kudlow's Words

Larry Kudlow, who writes for the National Review and hosts his own show on CNBC, was one of the conservatives who attended the big dinner with Obama last night. The event was technically off the record, but on his show Wednesday, Kudlow offered a little insight into the goings on. If Kudlow's reaction is in any way indicative of how the group reacted as a whole, then Obama's evening would have to be considered a hit:

The First Supper

Obama sure is taking this whole, "listening to Republicans respectfully" thing quite literally. Last night he slipped out of his hotel, drove up Connecticut Avenue and found himself in the home of columnist George Will. Also in attendance: David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, and the neo-thug himself, Bill Kristol. What a foursome. I'm assuming this will raise some eyebrows from the left at the idea that Obama is trying to woo the un-wooable or, understandably, out of the general loathing of a crew who spent the better part of 2008 trying to mislead and scare the country into thinking Obama was some strange "other" who sits down when he pees.

But this is a good thing. I don't see any downside to breaking bread with guys in the fox hole staring back at you. If anything, a little personal charm could result in a few pulled punches from these guys, who can engender real right-wing animosity of Hannity-esque proportions while still holding sway as dispensers of rational thought (well, maybe not Kristol). Obama wasn't going to win anyone over last night, but if he can take the edge off and make them think twice before levying another dishonest attack, then that's a big win.

Another point: it's time to face up to the fact that this isn't mere lip-service from Obama when he talks about being inclusive and tolerant of Republicans. Obama seems content with the notion that he might not have all the answers and with the idea that the other side might occasionally be right. If he's going to error, it's going to be on the side of listening to the right more than the left. That's a good thing. It also reminds me of an FDR quote I saw at Greenwald's blog: "I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it." Both sides need to keep this in mind, especially Democrats. Obama's first inclination won't be to go to the far left on most issues. He's going to ask a lot of the base and Congressional Dems to move him there. The stimulus package and closing of Gitmo bare this out.

-- Update --

Chait throws out a thought:

Imagine this counterfactual: George W. Bush (or maybe a victorious John McCain) sat down before his first inauguration with Paul Krugman, E.J. Dionne, and Frank Foer. Would conservatives have reacted with the same equanimity? No, I think they'd have gone nuts. And the reason is that they wouldn't have confidence in Bush or McCain to be surrounded by liberal ideas without being deeply influenced by them. I don't think they'd have reacted this way if, say, a President Mitt Romney did the same thing.

And that's why liberals aren't having a cow.

And Sullivan, unsurprisingly, is gloating:

If you're concerned with government before politics, as Obama is, and intellectually confident, as Obama is, you are not afraid to encounter any number of countervailing opinions. Obama isn't afraid. Increasingly, I think his greatest strength is simply his emotional intelligence in this respect. He knows that people need to feel engaged, respected and not neglected - especially his domestic opponents and America's enemies.

I also predict that Obama will win over the conservative intellectual elites in Washington as effectively as he did at Harvard and Chicago. He won't win over the pure partisans. But the intellectually honest and open-minded ones? You watch.

There's certainly something to the notion that Obama's is comfortable with his intelligence. Anyone who has been paying attention, or listened to how conservative law students at Harvard talk about the guy, know this. That's something we haven't seen in a president in some time. Bush is an idiot. Clinton was never comfortable. As for how Republicans might act if the situation were reversed? Well, we all know that conservatives would have lost their damn minds. But I think that has less to do with trusting Bush's brain than it does with generally not being able to acknowledge that the opposition is even worthy of setting the dinner table for. That's a lesson of Clinton's presidency: most Republicans behaved as though Clinton was illegitimate throughout his time in office. This gesture from Obama is one of many designed to escape hearing that drumbeat at quite the same decibel level.

Anyway, this move by Obama was deft, bordering on brilliant. It continues the narrative that the guy is above partisan politics. Clearly he's not. But it's more glowing press coverage that a politician would typically kill for.

We're looking at a total 180 degree turn from the Bush years.

More here.

The Other Side

While most of the chatter surrounding Obama picking Warren for the invocation has been directed at Obama, Alan Wolfe says that the bigger deal was Warren actually saying yes:

Warren's decision to accept an invitation from a liberal president is as clear a symbol of the entry of evangelicals into mainstream culture as one can imagine. In the conservative Christian subculture, liberals are treated with scorn. In the real world, they control the White House and Congress. How many evangelical preachers will be able to demonize Obama once Mr. Evangelical himself has blessed him? By opposing Warren's choice with such vehemence, the left seems determined to drive evangelicals back to the world of victimology and conspiracy-mongering. This is not wise.

The other trend in American evangelicalism that should worry conservatives is that, for all their talk of reading the Bible literally, evangelicals are slowly becoming more comfortable with changing their positions on political issues, including hot-button ones such as abortion and gay rights. Evangelicals frequently change their views. They were once firm opponents of slavery who then endorsed segregation and now confess to the sin of racism. They supported religious freedom only to move in the direction of supporting a church establishment even though some remain strict separationists. They will never accept abortion (although they may be open to anti-poverty measures that reduce their frequency). But they could, given their strong commitment to marriage, eventually endorse marriage among gays. (Many younger evangelicals already do.) The more they emerge from their subculture and meet real gay people, including married couples, the sooner they will do so. Warren himself, although he has positioned himself as an alternative to such hard-right activist as James Dobson, is conventionally conservative in his views on social issues. But he knows as well as anyone that the future of his faith belongs to the more open-minded.

The result could be a backlash on the right that pushes more moderate Evnagelicals to the center - where Obama is - and force the hard-right further into the political wilderness. That's great news for Democrats. And it's a useful reminder that not all Evangelicals fit into a single plot line, just as not all gays are outraged over this.

Chess

Ok, I know some people might be overdosing on Rick Warren, but I have to give you one more hit. Hey, this is important. The mixing of political strategy and culture issues is one provocative clusterbang. Kos makes a good point on the hullabaloo ... sort of:

It is precisely this backlash that has forced Obama to clearly affirm his commitment to equality. And it will be continued pressure that will force him to do the right thing on the issue. If we shut up, he'll take the path of least resistance. And that path of least resistance is kowtowing to the conservative media, the clueless punditocracy, and bigots like Warren.

Well, I'd say instead that it was the appointment of Warren that gave Obama the opportunity to affirm his commitment. In short order, Obama has a cadre of wise men who could have just as easily been Johnny Maverick's defense secretary, national security adviser and spiritual guru. That doesn't mean Obama's tacking to the center on foreign policy and social issues; in fact, I think it means just the opposite. This is a very basic political chess move. Obama is stealing the conservative movement's symbolic leaders to provide cover and build a coalition. Contrary to what Kos says,Obama was absolutely counting on a backlash. That's part of the move: it was a given that the gay community and progressives were going to push back loudly, as they should. But what matters more are the moves that follow. Beyond the momentary hollering, finding common ground is the bigger goal, as Crain points out:

Keep your eyes on the prize, boys. Obama's campaign to unify the country -- which last I checked includes millions of Warren's fellow travelers -- is in the service of an administration whose stated policy positions are the most supportive ever on LGBT civil rights.

You can't make this a center-left country without changing some hearts and minds. Obama's political calculation in picking such a divisive figure presents opportunities (at the very least it sets a far more respectful tone than what we've come to expect from our leaders), especially on issues like climate change, torture and AIDS, where Warren, like progressives, has a vested interest. Obama is elevating Warren. Warren knows this. A move like this typically comes with a return of favor. And keep in mind that there are other things Obama controls the purse strings to that may interest Warren, like funding faith based initiatives.

Meanwhile, the gay and lesbian community is no longer a one note movement. There are multiple issues that matter. And Rick Warren is a vessel through which Obama could deliver a unified effort between progressives and Evangelicals on many issues, including the global war on AIDS:

LGBT people also care about global poverty and the AIDS pandemic (which is both a global and domestic issue). We cannot, and should not, absent ourselves from the table of communities coming together around these shared concerns. The LGBT community has long years of experience working around HIV/AIDS and the opportunity to share this knowledge and these skills with a global community. If Rick Warren is serious about addressing the HIV/AIDS crisis then he needs to be working with LGBT people, and he needs to approach the disease from a holistic framework that sees the virus for what it is: a pandemic that affects all identities.

From my vantage point, that looks to be the play. If nothing comes of this, if Obama's stated policy positions don't lead to something tangible that the liberal and Evangelical community can agree on, or if we don't see the repeal of DOMA, then this just might be the politics of Clinton's crass triangulation; something ventured and nothing gained. But Obama shouldn't be judged on this now. That comes later.

-- Update --

Sullivan adds:

If I cannot pray with Rick Warren, I realize, then I am not worthy of being called a Christian. And if I cannot engage him, then I am not worthy of being called a writer. And if we cannot work with Obama to bridge these divides, none of us will be worthy of the great moral cause that this civil rights movement truly is.

The bitterness endures; the hurt doesn't go away; the pain is real. But that is when we need to engage the most, to overcome our feelings to engage in the larger project, to understand that not all our opponents are driven by hate, even though that may be how their words impact us. To turn away from such dialogue is to fail ourselves, to fail our gay brothers and sisters in red state America, and to miss the possibility of the Obama moment.

Inclusion is about including those who aren't inclusive. Being tolerant of those who are not tolerant. Being bigger than their smallness. The politics of division is easy. What Obama is asking is much, much harder. But then, isn't this why we elected the guy?