I’ve never heard of most of the people who got the prize over the last century. I recognize Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Schweitzer, Henry Kissinger, (must be a typo), Kofi Annan, Doctors without Borders, The United Nations, Yitzahk Rabin, Nelson Mandella, Mikhail Gorbachev, Elie Wiesel, Mother Theresa, Begin & Sadat and Jane Addams. That’s about it.

Presidents are well positioned for international awards, and so it is with Obama. Members of the Nobel committee have basically admitted that this was a Thank-God-He’s-Not-Bush award. Americans tend to forget, that while we fear the Axis of Evil, the rest of the world fears us. While Obama certainly has his hands full fixing Afghanistan and Iraq, the world community knows they are wars he inherited.

The world hopes upon hope that he is at least not the kind of guy who will initiate a pre-emptive attack on a sovereign nation like his predecessor. Simply by defeating George Bush and for being one of the few clear voices against the invasion of Iraq, Obama gained points with the Nobel committee. Peace, after all, begins with the reduction of bellicose rhetoric, and the world was sick of being bullied by a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do president.

Whether Obama will live up to the prize is another thing. I’m among the bleeding-heart liberals who retain total faith in his intelligence, moral compass and leadership. I am not surprised at all by the wild reactions of those who think otherwise. Obama scares the pants off a lot of scary people. They are threatened by his attitude, his youth, his rock-star charisma, his brain, his political party, his ability to express himself well, his confidence, his middle name, his laid back style, his openness to new ideas, and his skin color. We voted for the right guy this time, and the Nobel committee wants us to know they think so too.

The prestigious prize, unfortunately, will only make the scary people paranoid. And I feel for them. In fact, I was one of them during the Bush administration. That man scared me to pieces for all the opposite reasons.

The award, as has recently been pointed out, is not just for accomplishment. It is for encouragement. It is designed not just to shine a spotlight on those who have walked the path of peace, but as a distant flare that indicates where the path goes. As a nation, we had gone way off course. The Nobel committee, apparently, hopes to show Obama that he is back on track – but only if he sticks to the campaign promises he made to fight fewer wars and reduce nuclear arms and, like his Nobel predecessor Theodore Roosevelt, to walk softly and carry a big stick.

Which brings us to the minor point of this memo. Just as the Nobel committee is reminding Barack of his promises, we here in the Seacoast should remember that the first presidential peace laureate was Teddy himself. Roosevelt won the prize in 1906, the year after he successfully halted the Russo-Japanese War through the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth. Roosevelt didn’t attend, but the more I read about the treaty the more clear it is that he used his big stick well. From his summer home at Oyster Bay, he applied all sorts of pressure on the ambassadors and on the emperor and the czar they represented. Ultimately, against their own separate wills, the parties compromised and, at least temporarily, stopped the killing.

Roosevelt, it is clear, really hated war. I recently read his entire autobiography, or had it read to me by my Kindle. It is not an easy book to swallow, but Teddy’s sincerity and love of the public good comes shining through. You can see it in his desire to conserve federal land for public use, and his attempts to smash monopolistic corporations, and to fight for union labor. Sure, he liked to kill wild animals. He wasn’t the most liberated of civil rights advocates. He bent the rules and was macho in the extreme. But the guy cared about people, and he preferred peace to war. An he risked his political career to bring two warring nations together in New Hampshire.

Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel prize too in 1919. I’ve always had issues with him, so I need to do more reading. But when it comes to books written by presidents, you can see a direct link between Roosevelt, who was a successful writer before he was president, and our most prolific literary leader – Jimmy Carter. Carter was and remains passionate about bringing peace to the Middle East. It’s clear why the Nobel committee thought of him, even though it took them until 2003.

I hear Carter and Roosevelt’s compassion in the words of Barack Obama, even though he is forced by the constraints of his job, to sometimes be tough. I hate it when Obama says we have to root out and kill Bin Laden and other terrorist leaders. I assume it pains him as well. Killing is anathema to peace. But this is America, and that’s the way Americans talk. And that is partly why we are in the mess we are in. Walk softly, Roosevelt said, and we did not walk softly during the Bush years. We struck back, flailing that big stick wildly and shouting into the wind. The terrorists scared us deeply with 9/11, and our knee-jerk response scared the planet.

There are those who believe the Treaty of Portsmouth still has lessons to teach. It was, after all, one of those very rare times in history when America prevented, rather than entered, a war. Maybe Mr. Obama could benefit from rereading Teddy’s autobiography, or Theodore Rex by Edmun Morris, or David McCullough’s biography Mornings on Horseback. After all, like his Nobel predecessors, Barack Obama is a bestselling author. He knows how to use the power of words. He knows how to walk and talk softly. And now that he has the world’s biggest stick in hand – we die-hard peaceniks and liberals hope he will threaten mightily and war no more.

I believe that is the message that he Nobel committee is sending to the president. Seven years and three months from now, when Obama has had an equal chance to change the world, we can fully compare his record to that of Mr. Bush and Mr. Roosevelt. Meanwhile, we can only hope he hears the voice of the Nobel committee above the violent and hurtful babbling of the scared and scary people who would rather cook and eat the dove of peace than endure an hour of hunger.

Copyright © 2009 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved