Predictably, as with anything Barack Obama seems to do these days, the controversy over his award of the Nobel peace prize began immediately with the usual radiots and videots fearing that this was some liberal conspiracy. Now the mainstream media, which more and more seems to take its cues from stage right, is asking, “Does he deserve it?”
As usual it’s the wrong question. Whether he deserves it or not is essentially irrelevant, because the point is he has it. Asking whether he deserves it is akin to the same arguments that rage after the Academy Awards or Monday morning quarterbacking after the game is over. Most of all, it’s looking back when you should be looking forward.
The real question about Obama’s Nobel is what does it mean for the future? Will the award, which the Bush family so clearly coveted, have positive or negative consequences? What will be its impact on Obama’s future actions and on his ability to carry them out?
The Acceptance
The first key to answering that question comes from Obama himself in his brief and eloquent acceptance letter. I quote it in full because it keeps getting distorted.
This morning, Michelle and I awoke to some surprising and humbling news. At 6 a.m., we received word that I’d been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009.
To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize — men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.
But I also know that throughout history the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes.
That is why I’ve said that I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations and all peoples to confront the common challenges of the 21st century. These challenges won’t all be met during my presidency, or even my lifetime. But I know these challenges can be met so long as it’s recognized that they will not be met by one person or one nation alone.
This award — and the call to action that comes with it — does not belong simply to me or my administration; it belongs to all people around the world who have fought for justice and for peace. And most of all, it belongs to you, the men and women of America, who have dared to hope and have worked so hard to make our world a little better.
So today we humbly recommit to the important work that we’ve begun together. I’m grateful that you’ve stood with me thus far, and I’m honored to continue our vital work in the years to come.
In an era when writing is rapidly becoming a lost art amidst text messages that remind me of the old typesetter’s characters for a mistake –etoin shrdlu– it is worth taking a closer look at this letter and its wording. If you want to know what Obama plans to do with this award, the answer lies in this letter.
Let us begin with the artful way Obama deals with the recipients’ requirement to be humble and deny they deserve the award. The important word in this opening is transformational. Last year I wrote a great deal about the need for transformational leadership including a piece asking whether Obama himself was a transformational leader. The short answer was not yet.
There is a lot of BS floating around about transformational leadership, so to cut through it, it is best to go to the man who coined the term, James MacGregor Burns:
Transformative leadership is more concerned with end-values such as liberty, justice, equality.
The test of leadership function is their contribution to change measured by purpose drawn from collective motives and values. (Leadership, pp. 426-427)
For Burns, the difference between transactional and transformational leadership lies in the arena of values. Transactional leaders are traditional politicians who get things done by wheeling and dealing. Transformational leaders lead from principle.
Burns’ colleague and the other key writer on transformational leadership, Bernard Bass, defined the four qualities of transformational leadership.
Leaders are truly transformational when they increase awareness of what is right,good, important, and beautiful, when they help to elevate followers’ needs for achievement and self-actualization, when they foster in followers higher moral maturity, and when they move followers to go beyond their self-interests for the good of their group, organization, or society.
Obama’s very deliberate use of this term acknowledges that in his view,the Nobel should go to leaders who epitomize the qualities Burns and Bass outline. One of their favorite examples is the inspiration of Nobel winner Dr. Martin Luther King, jr.–Mohandas Gandhi.
Now before everyone jumps in and says that’s precisely the point: Barack Obama is no Gandhi, let me interject that is exactly what Obama is a saying in this sentence. He knows he is no Gandhi, but by acknowledging the importance of transformational leadership he is in essence identifying the North Star of his own presidency.
This is an extremely important admission that up to this point Obama has never openly admitted. He is defining the goal of his presidency as transformational. This means his decisions will be guided by principles not political deals.
If you grasp this then you can begin to understand the health care debate. For Obama, expanding health care coverage is not a political, economic, or even social necessity, it is a moral imperative. This is profoundly different from the Clinton health-care remake which viewed health care more in economic and social terms. Health care reform driven by social terms means the program is all. If you don’t get the program you want, then all is lost.
Health care driven by moral terms is exactly the opposite: the program must serve the principles. Understanding this goes a long way to clearing up the misunderstandings about Obama’s health care objectives. If he seems to waffle between bills or not push a particular bill it is because it is the final result that matters.
Curiously this is a trait that Obama shares with the man Burns won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR sometimes showed indifference to specific bills or programs because what he cared about was results. He needed to put people back to work, but it was up to the Brain Trusters to figure out how. That sometimes exasperated people about Roosevelt just as it does about Obama.
But if you understand transformational leadership you need to know this about Obama and health care: he will not bend on the final outcome, he will not lose sight of the principles involved.
The Vision
We next move to the key part of any acceptance, what is the recipient’s vision of what the award offers for the future?
Perhaps the most eloquent acceptance speech ever made for the Nobel — in this case the award for literature — came from William Faulkner. His 1950 speech should still be required reading for anyone who cares about the future of the human species. As an aside I’m going to make a prediction — Obama will quote Faulkner’s Nobel speech in his own acceptance. Here is what the writer said:
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
All of us want to know how will an award like the Peace Prize change a person and how will they use the moral authority that comes with the honor they have won. Will they let it get to their heads, becoming more aloof, more imperious, more full of themselves, more certain they are right? We all know of cases where this has occurred, because we know honors hide a two-edged sword: they can either quickly cut the recipient down to size or become weapons to make that person better and by making that person better make the rest of us better.
We remember Dr. King as a Nobel winner because in the few years he had after receiving his award, he assumed more burdens rather than less, as if the award were somehow a call to campaign even harder for human rights. Just before he died the Poor People’s Campaign became a major focus and he used the moral authority that comes with the Peace Prize to speak out more sharply against the Vietnam War.
On the other hand, Henry Kissinger, who may be the least deserving recipient in recent history, has become even more full of himself than he was before the award, which in his case is not easy to do. Ever since then he has seen himself as America’s most distinguished elder statesman, an oracle of political wisdom who has all the answers. Hence someone managed to worm into his Wikipedia biography that he was “the most frequent visitor” to the Bush White House to advise the administration on the Middle East, a somewhat dubious honor given that those policies included torture.
Finally there is Jimmy Carter, whose post-award career is a case of someone who has become a greater force after the award than he was before it. Carter’s involvement in causes such as election reform and Habitat for Humanity and his willingness to serve as a mediator for international disputes has enhanced his stature since the award.
BTW, those who question Obama’s award forget King, Kissinger and Carter were all criticized as being unworthy of the award.
In a key part of his letter, Obama provide some clues as to his future direction. What he seems to be saying is exactly what his critics are saying: in order to truly deserve this award he needs to leave a lasting legacy.
The Future
Obama recognizes this in the third paragraph when he says the Nobel not only recognizes a single achievement but a set of causes. So what are these causes?
The first he identifies is a call “for all nations and all peoples to confront the common challenges of the 21st century.” This may seem a bit vague — and I am sure Obama will elaborate on it in his speech (prediction number two)– but in light of the previous administration and the current world situation it becomes a very bold statement, for it proclaims the end to unilateral action on the part of the United States.
I suspect this is what really has the far right upset about the award, for they’ve opposed internationalism since they scuttled American participation in the League of Nations almost a century ago. But the world has changed since 1918. Any nation that believes it can act unilaterally is headed for trouble and any individual who seeks to take a nation in that direction is mad.
We cannot claim for ourselves what we condemn in the policies of Iran or North Korea. We cannot eliminate the menace of Saddam Hussein then behave like him.
America is a multicultural, multiracial society operating in a global environment in which the economic, social, and political spheres are interconnected. The days of isolationism ended with two world wars. The only way to prevent the third is through collaboration.
In the next paragraph Obama acknowledges two additional causes — justice and peace. It is heartening to hear the first, for this blog used to have on its masthead a quotation from Woodrow Wilson’s First Inaugural:
Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto.
There are many other words and values of Obama could have evoked, but that he chose justice places him firmly in the international tradition of leaders ranging from Willy Brandt to John Paul II.
The second word, peace, is also extremely significant for it serves to ensure a world suspicious of the aggressive unilateral actions that occurred during the previous eight years that we do not seek war as a solution to international problems. If this seems obvious how soon we forget that not long ago that Bush and Cheney openly spoke of attacking Iran.
The Bottom Line
If Obama’s award rubs you the wrong way, get over it just like you need to get over the past election. Instead let us judge him on what he — and we — do with it. For it is in his last paragraph that Obama calls out for those who have supported him and his ideals to “recommit to the important work we have begun together.”
If the Nobel inspires that recommitment, then the award will have more than fulfilled its promise.
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