Hissy Fit over Obama's Nobel: We Wanted to Text Our Votes to Oslo?

Yes, Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize, and everyone, everyone, seems to be sputtering. The Republican National Committee has issued a new dumb statement having nothing to do with the issue at hand, and even the president's supporters -- almost to a man and woman, if my early-morning survey of the media is accurate -- seem to be asking whether Obama "deserves" it. What, after all, has the president "accomplished" so far in the arena of world peace? Shouldn't the Norwegians, well, wait awhile before honoring such a new and untried player on the international stage? Further -- and I love this one, heard from MSNBC's Savannah Guthrie at the crack of dawn -- doesn't winning this award increase pressure on the president? Doesn't it now behoove him to accomplish something substantive? Isn't this both a blessing and a curse?
Ohmygod can he handle the pressure?

While this last sentiment rankles the most, I have yet to hear or read a response to this morning's top story that I don't find annoying at best, wrongheaded at worst, but in nearly every instance American through and through. It's as though we had been searching for yet another occasion to demonstrate our callowness, our deeply ingrained ideological isolationism, to an international community which for the last year or so has had reason to believe that we weren't really so bad after all. They had decided to overlook the Bush years -- dark, dark days for America's international prestige -- like an episode of bad table manners and welcome us back into the communion of the civilized, and all we can say is, "Huh? Didn't you mean to call on somebody else? I haven't read the assignment yet!"

Listen: the Nobel Prize is not a popularity contest; it's not a Life Achievement Award such as the American Film Institute gives to movie legends on their last legs; it's not the Pulitzer, given to the writer of this year's most fashionably bleak novel, and it's not the Oscar, given because . . . well, hell, Paul Newman's never gotten one before and we like him. We don't get a vote. The prize is awarded annually -- well, not exactly, since the committee reserves the right NOT to give an award in any given year -- by the Norwegian Nobel Committee "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." We've all heard by now that only two previous sitting presidents have won the award: Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. We know also that Jimmy Carter won the award after he left office. Former Vice President Al Gore won the prize in 2007; and of course Martin Luther King, Jr. won the 1964 prize. But by my count some 19 American individuals -- I'm not counting agencies or foundations -- have won the Nobel Peace Prize; Obama joins a roster most of whose constituents are lesser-known than TR or MLK:

Elihu Root (1912) Ring a bell? I thought not. This former secretary of war (under McKinley and fellow-winner Theodore Roosevelt) was the very first American to win the Peace Prize. Root also served as secretary of state under TR. This man of peace is credited with reorganizing the U.S. military and with establishing the U.S. War College. He gave his name to the Root-Takahira Agreement, under whose terms Japan agreed to recognize American imperial claims to Hawaii and the Philippines, while the United States agreed to do the same in regard to Japan's hold on Korea and parts of China. In 1908, this agreement was thought to have eased tensions between the United States and the Empire of Japan; we all know what happened in 1941. For this and for other acts of bringing nations together through arbitration -- including, no doubt, hair-raising border dispute negotiations between those bitter enemies the United States and Canada -- Root won the Prize in 1912. He supported the entry of the United States into the First World War a few years later.

Frank B. Kellogg (1929) This taciturn Minnesotan had a fairly undistinguished term as a Republican U.S. senator before becoming secretary of state under Calvin Coolidge. He should perhaps have won a Nobel for successfully prosecuting Standard Oil in Standard Oil of NJ vs. United States in 1911, which effectively loosened Big Oil's stranglehold on American oil refining, but instead -- like Root -- was ostensibly given the award for a failed venture: the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a 1928 multinational treaty that sought to do away with war "as an instrument of national policy" -- in effect, to do away with war. Needless to say, it made little, if any, contribution to lasting world peace, even though over 60 "civilized" nations signed it. By the end of the 1930's, with all the Axis powers behaving in a downright unneighborly fashion with their neighbors, the pact was little more than a joke.

Nicholas Murray Butler (1931; shared with Jane Addams) Hard to say why this legendary president of Columbia University won the Peace Prize. True, he was lifelong pals with Elihu Root; true, he stumped for the Kellogg-Briand Pact; most notably, he scared up most of the money that started the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, long served as president of the endowment and also as president of the Pilgrims Society, which promotes peace between -- yes, another pair of bitter rivals -- the United States and Great Britain. Unfortunately, this noted anti-Semite also promoted peace between the United States and Mussolini's Italy, as well as between the United States and Nazi Germany, though he piously recanted these allegiances at the outbreak of the Second World War.

Henry Kissinger (1973) We've all heard of this one, haven't we? I include him not as a forgotten recipient, but as an unlikely recipient -- indeed, a recipient whose laureateship seems in extremely poor taste. Nicholas Murray Butler would almost certainly have punished those Columbia students who raised holy hell when Kissinger was offered a professorship in 1977, but lordy did they ever have good reason, the most notable being Kissinger's masterminding of the illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War and his role in the subsequent cover-up. To some observers, these and other actions amount to war crimes. He may have remained aloof from the better-publicized sleaze of the Nixon White House, but his hijinks in Southeast Asia make Watergate -- in the words of Lillian Hellman -- look like a pillow fight.

Not a terribly impressive line-up, is it? True, the list of American Peace Prize winners includes Martin Luther King, Jr., Jane Addams, George Catlett Marshall, and Elie Wiesel, all of whom had "accomplished" more by the time they won the prize than Obama has at this point in his life, but was any one of them Nobel-ed without a single raised eyebrow? Jane Addams, for instance, now almost universally revered, was once despised and derided as a socialist by the moneyed establishment. Martin Luther King was hounded and wire-tapped by his own government before being martyred and given his own national holiday. And for every high-profile Teddy Roosevelt or Jimmy Carter, there's a forgotten Emily Greene Balch or John Raleigh Mott.

My point is this: the Nobel Committee doesn't listen to or solicit American public opinion when it gives its awards. It never has. Committee members are as likely to honor a well-meaning bungler as they are an internationally famous religious leader. Maybe, just maybe, they see President Obama's very election as a sign of hope; maybe they appreciated his Cairo speech for what it was -- a giant leap forward in American relations with the Muslim world; maybe they're earnest in praising Obama's "extraordinary efforts to strengthen national diplomacy."

And maybe we're so American Idol-ized that all we can do is stamp our feet and pout about how they didn't ask us first, or at the very least let us text our votes to Oslo.