Washington Post: When Barack Obama was announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, even the fresh-faced president appeared a little shocked. “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 honored by this prize,” Obama said at the time.
Now, a former director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute has acknowledged that, in hindsight, he’s not so sure if giving the prize to Obama was a good move either.
In a new memoir titled “Secretary of Peace: 25 years with the Nobel Prize,” Geir Lundestad, the non-voting Director of the Nobel Institute until 2014, writes that he has developed doubts about the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to grant Obama the Nobel Peace Prize over the past six years. While the prize was designed to encourage the new president, it may have not have worked out as intended.
“In retrospect, we could say that the argument of giving Obama a helping hand was only partially correct,” Lundestad writes, according to VG newspaper. Lundestad explains that it became impossible for Obama to live up to the high expectations placed upon him. “Many of Obama’s supporters believed it was a mistake,” he writes. “As such, it did not achieve what the committee had hoped for.”
Categories: Americas, Bigotry, United States
Such is the audacity of stupidity, awarding a prize for something that was yet to be done and is still to be done.