I was surprised to learn that Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Didn't think he'd accomplished all that much in the nine months or so he'd been in office. I guess my definition of "accomplishment" needs to be reworked.
I was watching a bit of the press conference, for example, and the speaker referenced Obama's speech in Cairo. My first thought was, "Well, it was just a speech. So what?"
I think that gets back to two things. One, it was more than just a speech to the people who heard it. The view from here is presidents give speeches all the time. (That's what little presidents do.) But the act of traveling "over there" and speaking to "them" as equals has meaning. There's a respect in that I imagine no one was feeling from Bush.
Secondly, Americans tend to live in little bubbles. We can be remarkably dense about what's going on in the rest of the world. I think that we tend to underestimate the effect of our actions, both positive and negative. Yet, the rest of the world has an investment in global cooperation that has been building - likely without us noticing - for quite some time.
The withdrawal of the US from global politics probably hit pretty hard. Worse was the insistence of the former presidency that we were going to act in our own interest and damn the consequences. Those consequences weren't likely to affect us safe in our little suburbs. They would be felt in the wider world, by "them, over there." No wonder they were worried. And no wonder they were relieved to find that Obama wasn't going to take the same tack.
I suppose it could also come down to a rebuke to Bush. A way of saying, "Dude. You were so bad to us that all the other guy had to do is stand up and he's exponentially more appealing." I mean, you'd like to think the prize committee wouldn't be that petty, but I imagine that they took a little bit of only human pleasure in thinking of his reaction.
Ultimately, I think this is a case where we are on the inside looking out, unaware of how our actions are being perceived by the rest of the world. We didn't realize just how hard people were being hit by what Bush did or how much of a relief even the change is. It may be something intrinsic to Obama, or it may simply be the contrast with what might have been.
This diary on DailyKos lays out the text of Alfred Nobel's directive to the committee and notes that the award has often been "broadly interpreted."
