Nobel Surprise

Hendrik Hertzberg

The award to Obama illustrates, among other things, the difference between the ‘hard’ and the ‘soft’ Nobels. The prizes for physics, chemistry, and medicine are never given for trying, only for succeeding. Also, there is no apparent attempt to achieve regional, national or ethnic balance

If President Obama really had to get a gift postmarked Scandinavia this month, he would probably, on the whole, have preferred the Olympics. At least at the Olympics the judges wait till after the race to give you the gold medal.

They don't force it on you while you're still waiting for the bus to take you to the stadium. They don't give it to you in anticipation of possible future feats of glory, like a signing bonus or an athletic scholarship. They don't award it as a form of gentle encouragement, like a parent calling 'Good job!' to a toddler who's made it to the top rung of the monkey bars.

It's not a plastic, made-in-China 'participation' trophy handed out to everyone in the class as part of a program to boost self-esteem. It's not a door prize or a goody bag or a bowl of VIP fruit courtesy of the hotel management. It's not a gold star. It's a gold medal.

We can take it as a sign of what a lucky fellow our President is that winning the Nobel Peace Prize has been widely counted a bad break for him. Barack Obama has come very far very fast. Five years ago, not long after finishing a distant second for a Chicago congressional nomination, he was still one of the hundred and seventy-seven members of the Illinois state legislature.

Four years ago, he took his seat in the United States Senate, ushered there not only by his own undoubted talents but also by the serial self-destruction of his opponents.

One year ago, he won the Presidency with a margin of victory, nine and a half million votes, that was the largest since 1984, absent the tailwind provided by his predecessor's abysmal record, however, that margin would have been far smaller, possibly even nonexistent.

He is certainly one of fortune's favourites. He came into office on a tide of euphoria. Lately, though, his supporters have been experiencing a vague sense of disappointment. He may have saved the world from a second Great Depression and all that, but the jobless rate keeps on climbing, the planet keeps on heating up, Guantánamo keeps on not getting closed, and roadside bombs keep on exploding.

He's had eight whole months, and he still hasn't signed a comprehensive health-care bill. Given that his perceived political problem is exaggerated expectations, does he really need a Nobel Peace Prize before he has actually made any peace?

The award to Obama illustrates, among other things, the difference between the 'hard' and the 'soft' Nobels. The prizes for physics, chemistry, and medicine are never given for trying, only for succeeding. Also, there is no apparent attempt to achieve regional, national or ethnic balance. The same cannot be said of the literature prize, which frequently goes to authors who write in languages that few if any of the judges, eighteen grandees of the Swedish Academy, can read.

Anyhow, literature is a matter of taste, which is why, among American writers, Pearl S. Buck was deemed worthy of the honour while Henry James was not. (The roster of literary losers, A to Z, also includes Auden, Borges, Conrad, Joyce, Kafka, Nabokov, Proust, Tolstoy, Twain, and Zola).

As for the relatively new economics prize (full name: the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel), it is neither hard nor soft just kind of mushy, a Golden Globe, not an Oscar.

The peace prize, first given in 1901, has always been the trickiest of the lot. For the first fifty years or so the judges, a five-member committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament, almost always honoured a person or an organization devoted to working, in the words of Alfred Nobel's will, "for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses", a formula that excluded, for example, Mohandas Gandhi.

After the Second World War, the judges' definition of peace grew more capacious, producing laureates like Martin Luther King Jr, Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Dalai Lama. But the choice has always been, as a former chairman of the judging committee wrote in 2001, "to put it bluntly, a political act."

The Chairman of the Republican National Committee would agree. He quickly fired off a fund-raising e-mail headed 'Nobel Peace Prize for Awesomeness', calling the choice proof that "the Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control". A trifle overwrought? Perhaps.

Still, to be fair to the Chairman, there's little doubt that for eight years the most prominent figure hovering over the Nobel committee's deliberations was not any of the nominees under consideration, it was George W. Bush. Jimmy Carter richly deserved his belated prize, he is as responsible as were Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin for the thirty years' peace between Israel and Egypt, and Al Gore, who sounded the tocsin on climate change, deserved his.

But in neither case did the judges try very hard to hide their satisfaction in delivering a rebuke to Bush. This time their message was one of relief, and of hope and confidence, not just in Obama himself but in a United States that has re-embraced, as the prize announcement put it, "that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman".

A few hours after the news from Oslo, Obama, looking a little abashed, even a little uncomfortable, stepped up to a portable podium in the Rose Garden and spoke of the honor that had come to him so soon, too soon, even many of his admirers admit, and so unexpectedly.

"Let me be clear," he said, and went on, first acknowledging the obvious:

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honoured by this prize, men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace. But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women and all Americans want to build, a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents.

And I know that throughout history the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it's also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the twenty-first century.

After a few more sombre words, he turned and walked back into the West Wing, there to attend another in a series of meetings on the strategy that he soon must set for the war in Afghanistan. The prize is won, but the peace, as always, is elusive.

Illustration: Tom Bachtell, The New Yorker