Under the recommendation of ER, I watched the great Cornel West expound on President Obama's Nobel Prize. Quite simply, his message is simple - now, he has to live up to it.
West's message is both a blessing and a warning to the President. His heartfelt desire that the President's parents and grandparents had lived to see this is genuine. His insistence that the Peace Prize obligates the President to rethink how he envisions himself as the leader of the greatest military empire in the history of the planet is clear.
We can argue back and forth over the appropriateness of the prize - and even the President seems more than little embarrassed by it - yet, should he accept it, it seems to me that West is exactly right. This is the political equivalent of baptism; he is no longer just the President of the United States. He, like those West mentioned (King, Mandela, Bunche) and others (Carter, Sadat/Begin, Medicins Sans Frontiers) unmentioned should remind him that he has joined a great cloud of witnesses. His dual role as President and Nobel Laureate makes him more than just our President, but the latest member of a small, elite group of men and women who have dedicated their lives to making the world better, or perhaps just to doing what they could to making it less full of pain and misery.
Barack Obama has people all over the world looking to him as a beacon of hope. Few human beings can really live up to that challenge, yet the Nobel committee certainly seems to believe he can meet it. It is up to us, the American people, to help him.
