Barack Obama, to be candid, probably clinched the Nobel Peace Prize when he secured the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination last year. He has proved that words, not just actions, have power to heal in the television age. His elegant and powerful cadences have reverberated not just across that “arsenal of democracy” called America, but the entire world. Secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s fatal strategy in her election campaign was to dismiss much of what Obama has had to say as “just words”. She, like many others, failed to grasp that in the valley of economic depression and the shadow of al-Qaeda, Obama’s “just words” have served as a staff to comfort the American people.
Obama’s words have begun to dispel the darkness from American hearts and minds, and millions of others across the free world polls show, by evoking a sense that tomorrow can be better than today. The honeyed delivery of Ronald Reagan achieved much the same in the 1980s when he challenged Mikhail Gorbachev “to tear down that wall”. Like all great orators, Obama captures the truth of his era in simple and uncluttered phrases. It is for the reassertion of these magisterial truths, when they were at real risk of being lost, that Obama has been awarded the prize.
For just a moment, it is worth taking a brief detour into American political history. The inevitable and hackneyed comparisons between Obama and his Democratic predecessor, Jack Kennedy, and between the watershed 1960 and 2008 elections, have been made: the soaring rhetoric; the “audacity of hope”; and the lanky and handsome candidates, both of whom were establishment outsiders. But a more accurate and interesting comparison between Obama and John McCain would be if Kennedy had faced not the serpentine Richard Nixon, but his immediate predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, who, like the crusty McCain, was a decorated war leader.
And unlike the election of 1960, how extraordinary it was that after the locust years of the Bush administrations, two of the most decent public figures in American public life — one radiating youthful élan and new vision, the other wisdom and experience — squared off against each other. Both were distinguished from their fellow candidates by conveying, in their speeches and in their personal histories, the American idea of nobility. Most significant of all, Obama — born of a mixed-race marriage — he ran not as the first black presidential candidate, but as the first post-racial candidate for the White House. He has used his rhetorical skills to materialise Martin Luther King’s song of liberty and non-racialism. His victory was a quantum leap forward for the creation of a non-racial world order. The prize is, partially, recognition of this fact.
Obama’s election and first year in office will also be remembered as one when words matter more than detailed policy programmes. One of the overlooked similarities between Kennedy and Obama is the recurring theme of reconciliation at home and abroad. In his acceptance speech, Kennedy alluded to Churchill’s 1940 address, Their Final Hour, in which the new prime minister, speaking after the “battle of France”, rejected an inquest into the appeasement conduct of past governments. Kennedy took a similar approach to the mistakes of the Eisenhower years. He told the Democratic convention: “I think the American people expect more from us than the cries of indignation … We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that guides us … As Winston Churchill said on taking office some 20 years ago: if we open up a quarrel between the present and the past, we shall be in danger of losing the future.” It is this standard, not the many sins of George Bush’s neo-conservatives, by which Obama asks to be judged.
Obama’s famous keynote speech to the Democratic Party in Chicago in 2004 similarly evoked Kennedy’s reconciliatory tones: “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America … We coach Little League in the blue states and have gay friends in the red states … There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.” It is the restoration of the American ideal of nobility to its rightful place at the heart of international relations and domestic policy, which has led to the committee’s decision. Lastly, only an American president whose African grandfather experienced the humiliation of racist British imperialism could say to us as candidly as Obama did in Accra recently: the main problem is not our colonial legacy but what we have done and failed to do.
Yes, the Nobel Peace Prize committee’s decision is unusual to say the least. It was, to quote Obama, audacious. Yes, it a big risk which could backfire. And yes, it is visionary and, my God, don’t we need a little drop of that at the moment? The substance, I believe, will follow.
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