Obama Nobel Prize Speech

President Obama made the smart decision to confront the dual conundrums of his Nobel Peace prize head-on at the start of his stirring address accepting the award. First, there was the uncomfortable fact that the president hasn’t actually done much, if anything, to deserve the award other than win an election and make nice speeches. Second, there was the even more uncomfortable fact that the winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize is not only, as he said, “the commander in chief of a nation in the midst of two wars,” but one who just decided to deploy tens of thousands more troops.

In this situation, you could try to elide the problems, though they are awfully big elephants to ignore. Or you could — switching metaphors here — try to make rhetorical lemonade from factual lemons. Obama and his speechwriters chose the latter course. I thought it worked brilliantly.

Obama dispatched the first issue — whether he merited the award — by pleading guilty to being unworthy, at least by contrast.

Compared to some of the giants of history who have received this prize — Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela — my accomplishments are slight,” he said. “And then there are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened of cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women — some known, some obscure to all but those they help — to be far more deserving of this honor than I.

Hard to take issue with that.

The second problem, as the president acknowledged, was not so amenable to sweeping away with a few words of gracious humility. The paradox of the war president and the peace prize consumed the remainder of Obama’s speech as he sought to knit together those opposites. His fundamental point was that a president, or any head of state, can be inspired by the non-violent philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. but cannot be shackled by them.

The “hard truth,” the president said, is “that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”

As “someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work,” Obama said, “I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak — nothing passive — nothing naïve — in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.”

Except, he went on to admit in the next breath, there is:

[As] a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

In the course of his short career, Obama has hit rhetorical home runs when it mattered most: the 2004 convention keynote, the speech on race in the midst of the Jeremiah Wright controversy. This was rhetoric married with a serious, comprehensive worldview — a speech not by a newcomer to the national scene or a candidate under fire, but by a president who seemed, more than ever, to have grown into the job.

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