Heckuva Job, Barack (Title from Ross Douthat)

From today's the NYTimes Op-Ed pages comes this nugget from Ross Douthat:

"This was Barack Obama’s chance.

Here was an opportunity to cut himself free, in a stroke, from the baggage that’s weighed his presidency down — the implausible expectations, the utopian dreams, the messianic hoo-ha.

Here was a place to draw a clean line between himself and all the overzealous Obamaphiles, at home and abroad, who poured their post-Christian, post-Marxist yearnings into the vessel of his 2008 campaign.

Here was a chance to establish himself, definitively, as an American president — too self-confident to accept an unearned accolade, and too instinctively democratic to go along with European humbug.

He didn’t take it. Instead, he took the Nobel Peace Prize.

Big mistake."

Yes, agreed. The Nobel Committee has clarified for all to see what a joke this award has become. Alfred Nobel could not be happy.

Read it all here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/opinion/12douthat.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss