Published: October 13, 2009 11:30 pm      

Nobel should be source of pride

THE ISSUE: The president’s Nobel Peace Prize.

OUR VIEW: Critics have taken the wrong tack.



President Barack Obama sounded just the right tone last week in reacting to news that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

He said he was both surprised and humbled by the award.

“Let me be clear,” he said. “I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.”

It’s hard to say whether Obama will be able to deliver on his rhetoric. As his detractors have pointed out, he has been in office for only seven months, and his peacemaking resume is still a bit thin.

But Obama acknowledged that, saying he viewed the award as a call to action.

His conservative critics are having a field day.

Talk show host Rush Limbaugh’s Web site offered the headline “Our president is a laughing stock” and described Obama as the darling of “European leftist elites.” Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele took a similar line in a fundraising letter sent out within hours of the announcement.

“Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control,” he wrote. “And truly patriotic Americans like you and our Republican Party are the only thing standing in the way.”

Democrats expressed outrage at such reactions, noting that Steele and Limbaugh were taking the same position on the award as the Taliban and Hamas.

We preferred the reaction of John McCain, the president’s Republican opponent in the last election. He called it a source of national pride.

“Americans are always pleased when their president is recognized by something on this order,” McCain said Sunday on CNN.

Also sounding the right note was McCain’s fellow Republican senator, Lindsay Graham.

“If he can successfully turn around Afghanistan, deter Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, I will build a bookcase for him to put it in,” Graham said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

We line up with McCain and Graham.

It might be appropriate to voice surprise at the award or to suggest it might be premature, but we should all be proud that our president has gained such recognition on an international level, and we should hope that his accomplishments ultimately will justify the committee’s vote of confidence.

After all, what do we have to lose?

– Pharos-Tribune, Logansport, and Kokomo Tribune