Obama,
Nobel and Us
Barack Obama is the first president of the United States to be
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and not have the nation celebrate
him. Instead we gasped. We fumed. We debated. We complained. My
what idiots we are. In the year preceding his election, both as
candidate and president, Barack Obama had done more to advance
the goals of global peace than any living human being. I know
this sounds preposterous to many of us, but it is nonetheless
true: Barack Obama has changed the world. He has changed the way
the world sees America and thus has changed the world. And it is
precisely that seismic event, that massive shift in America’s
face and therefore the global environment, that Nobel recognized
in 2009. The only reason we gasped is that we are ignorant. The
world must think us idiots not to congratulate our own president
and, worse, for not seeing past our own porch steps to
understand the impact our president is having on this planet.
Our cynicism presumes they awarded Obama the Nobel for being the
president, which is not true. They gave him the Nobel for being
Obama. For resonating an unambiguous positive message of hope
and change, and for eliminating America’s growing narcissist
arrogance virtually overnight and, in so doing, making the world
a better and demonstrably safer place.
Barack Obama became so popular in 2007-2008 that white religious
conservatives began floating the idea that Obama was the
antichrist. No, I’m not making this stuff up. Then they said he
was un-American because of an out-of-context rhetorical flourish
from Obama’s former pastor, The Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Now
they’ve more or less settled into insisting—based upon absolute
no evidence—that Obama is a Muslim, a paranoia an alarming
percentage of white America subscribes to (I’m not being racial:
only white people believe this).
Barack Obama is a uniquely impressive human being. Most of us
see him only in a political context and are incapable of
evaluating his humanity as opposed to his political worth.
Absent that political context, the outside world both sees,
acknowledges, and, as with Nobel, rewards Obama’s humanity, his
place among other human beings on this planet. And many if not
most of the world think we are fools to exhaust ourselves, as we
do, trying to malign him. Someone should tally up how many
millions—if not billions—of dollars have been spent in an
effort to political destroy Barack Obama and impugn his name.
Then we should wonder, as I’m sure the world does, how much
humanitarian good could have been done with that money instead.
What concerns me the most about the election is the future of
our nation is in the hands of the least informed and, in many
cases,
the most paranoid. This is as it always was. We are divided
tribally such that some people will vote for the president
because he’s black, some will vote against him because he’s
black, some will invent reasons to oppose the president and
support Romney—whom they neither like nor trust, who is already
abandoning their values and flip-flopping yet again—just to
avoid dealing with their own racism.
Both candidates having made their case, no reasonably informed, thinking person could earnestly choose
Mitt Romney on any other basis than an irrational hatred of the
president. Mitt Romney has changed positions on virtually every
issue, and is, even now, changing yet again—re-embracing
universal health care, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform, gay
rights and other issues he’s vehemently opposed during his
primary run. As I promised he would, Romney has thrown the ignorant, racist, homophobic
rabid, lunatic right-wing mouth breathers who reluctantly
nominated him under the bus. He is screwing them, just as I said
he would. And they’re saying nothing. Why? Because they hate the
president just that much.
The elevation of Mitt Romney is the ultimate manifestation of
that lie: people who hate this president so much that they’ll
vote for anybody—even a proven, unprincipled, flip-flopping liar
like Romney whose positions on the issues they cannot trust. But
Romney’s positions don’t matter. Nobody is voting for Romney,
anyway. They’re voting against Obama.
If you don’t show up, these deeply wounded, irrational people are going to replace our president with an empty suit. These are the facts. Has nothing to do with Romney’s race or his religion or any of that. It has to do with video tape. With a few clicks on YouTube, you can see for yourself this man has absolutely no principles and no character. But he will become the next president of the United States unless you do something about it.
