Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times
Obama remains a powerful voice of hope and change for many Europeans, not only because of his eloquence and his reassertion of America’s role as a leader of international diplomacy, but also because he physically embodies change as progress. In this country, most people have taken their cue from a president determined to govern as chief executive of a post-racial society.
Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe
Obama would not have been in position to receive the Nobel Peace Prize had not Americans at a critical level made peace — or called an unprecedented truce — with its racist past. Our history is rooted so deep in slavery and segregation that terrible vestiges among the masses are still with us today in poor public schooling and disproportionate unemployment of black men….
[The Prize committee] would have been better off proclaiming, “The Norwegian Nobel Committee awards its 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to the United States of America for having the courage to come full circle 233 years after a slave-owning nation declared independence by saying all men are created equal.’’
What? These guys aren’t being humorous and sarcastic? They really believe that we, the people of the United States, deserve the Nobel because most of us have taken our cue from a determinedly post-racial president?
I wish they weren’t so funny, whether their humor is intentional or not. But then, I also wish we actually had a post-racial president. Instead, what we have is a very, very liberal president, and post-racial is to liberal as oil is to water.
