Words.
"The Nobel Peace Prize award to Barack Obama seems so goofy -- even if you’re a fan, you have to admit that he hasn’t really done much yet as a peacemaker. But there’s an aspect of this prize that is real and important -- and that validates Obama’s strategy from the day he took office.
The Obama team came to the White House convinced that one of America’s biggest problems in the world was “reflexive anti-Americanism,” as Obama put it in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly two weeks ago. They saw America’s unpopularity as a big national-security problem, and they were right.
So they set about winning hearts and minds (the Nobel judges among them) from Day One. Obama gave a series of speeches calculated to position him as the Un-Bush. He listed his achievements in that same U.N. speech -- halting torture, ordering the closure of Guantanamo, withdrawing from Iraq, backing negotiations on climate change, and paying America’s debts at the United Nations itself.
Europeans liked it, too, when the president picked a fight with Israel over settlements, and when he showed himself so determined to negotiate with Iran that he overlooked the fact that its government had stolen an election.
That’s what he’s being honored for, really: reconnecting America to the world and making us popular again."
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