Peace for Obama

Two days after President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the premature recognition is attracting more and more doubt and suspicion in the United States. For an aspiring and still relatively unaccomplished politician, such an accolade turns out to be more of an embarrassment and nuisance in a society which is ruthlessly critical of its representatives and prioritises achievements over high-flying rhetoric. With a lot of criticism piling on Obama for being too much of a celebrity and too little of a hands-on politician, the Nobel Prize comes at an inopportune moment, fuelling reservations about the President's record. The astonishment with which the decision has been met in the United States, and abroad, indicates how serious modern threats are taken and how unwilling the public is to appreciate politicians just for what they say, rather than for their actions. Clearly, it also reflects the American values that underscore restraint and work ethic, at the end of which, not at the beginning, is the recognition.

Far from being impossible to pinpint, the list of Obama's early, largely symbolic, successes, even though not seen as such by all, is indeed counting.