At the risk of alienating some of you, I have to express astonishment at the selection of President Barack Obama to receive the Nobel Peace Prize this year. In my estimation, the president does not deserve this honor. He himself came close to saying as much this morning. He may deserve it some day—all of us can pray that every president does—but he doesn’t deserve it yet.
I believe President Obama should respectfully decline it: in part to demonstrate the importance of humility in leadership, in part to throw a spotlight on more deserving leaders, and in part to emphasize that mere aspirations are not enough for credible leadership or for civilization's most important award. Humanity needs leaders who selflessly devote their entire lives to humanitarian ideals. It is they whom the Nobel Peace Prize should recognize and honor: the Dalai Lama, for example, and Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer, all of whom certainly did deserve the honor they received.
To be sure, the choice of recipients for the Nobel Peace Prize has often been controversial, as much by omission as by fact. No one questions the selection of Linus Pauling, Martin Luther King Jr., Lech Walesa, Nelson Mandela, or Elie Wiesel. But such pivotal figures as Mahatma Gandhi, Corazon Aquino, Eleanor Roosevelt, Pope John Paul II, Steve Biko, Dorothy Day, Ronald Reagan, and Cesar Chavez were never so honored, while the awards to Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Al Gore, Le Duc Tho, and some others ignited a firestorm of criticism.
Rather, it is the simple question of whether anyone on the world stage so briefly as President Obama, and whose file of achievement is so thin, should receive this award, at the expense of others who have done so much more to deserve it. Note that the deadline for nominations for this year’s prize was on February 1, less than two weeks after Obama assumed office.
The will of Alfred Nobel, which endowed the Prizes, stipulated that the award be given only to living persons. Happily, quite a few living persons are fully deserving of it.
I think first of Morgan Tsvangirai, the courageous Zimbabwe opposition leader, whom I had the pleasure of meeting on a trip to South Africa some years ago. Tsvangirai has been risking life and limb to fight the forces of oppression in Zimbabwe for a decade or longer. Earlier this year, his wife and the mother of their six children was killed in a head-on auto collision; not coincidentally, auto “accidents” are the method of choice by Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe for stifling critics of his regime.
I think next of Václav Havel, the last president of Czechoslovakia before its dissolution and the first president of the Czech Republic. As much or more than Lech Walesa and Mikhail Gorbachev, both of whom were honored by the Nobel, Havel led millions of East Europeans to revolt against their calcified oppressors and eventually to demand democracy. (He could as well be honored by the Nobel Prize for Literature: He is the author of nearly two dozen acclaimed books and dramatic plays.)
I think also of George Mitchell, the former U.S. senator who brokered a peace between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland that led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The Troubles had persisted for generations before the accord. At the time Senator Mitchell got involved, there was no realistic hope for peace anytime soon.
I think even of Greg Mortenson, the American mountain climber who has built hundreds of schools in rural Pakistan, for girls as well as boys. Mortenson’s book Three Cups of Tea chronicles his effort. Of special note, he was so impoverished when he began building the schools that he was sleeping in the back seat of his car. Imagine, a homeless man on one side of the planet building schools for children on the other side.
There are others, too numerous to be listed. Because of their courage, a number of benighted countries with a history of violence or oppression or neglect are on the cusp of change. To paraphrase poet Langston Hughes, these brave leaders have dared the dark to stand.
To my thinking, what we have here is one of those teachable moments that President Obama is always talking about. He should think about it all weekend, and he should ask himself whether he ought to accept this award at this time. Then, on Monday morning, he should write to the Nobel Committee to say he respectfully declines the award because so many others deserve it so much more.
Now that would exemplify humility in leadership, and it would truly rise to a teachable moment for leaders everywhere. Maybe, just maybe, a few leaders would realize that leadership isn't about themselves, after all.