He also reveals that Mr Obama considered not going to pick up the award in Norway's capital, Oslo. His staff enquired whether other winners had skipped the ceremony but found this has happened only on rare occasions, such as when dissidents were held back by their governments. Mr Lundestad served as the committee's influential, but non-voting, secretary from to He has broken with the tradition of the secretive committee, whose members rarely discuss proceedings.
The book also gives other insights into the activities of the committee:. This year's Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on October 9. Nobel prize win 'humbles' Obama. US media on Obama Nobel award. And it does occur to you, eventually, that for an American president, bombing is easier than thinking. Obama is not, again, by nature, a violent, contentious sort of person.
And the civil war in Libya that resulted — well, it continues today. That reminds me of the part of your book where you zero in on comments Obama made in March about his failure to close Guantanamo. Once that set in, then the path of least resistance was just to leave it open. Many people thought Obama had done quite confrontational, quite remarkable things somewhere back in his career.
Maybe it happened at Harvard, maybe it happened in his time as a community organizer. Strength of character is established by doing something brave and original. That has to evolve by taking a stance of open resistance, and maybe once or twice even being alone in opposition and facing the powers that be.
He told me about a time when he was working to get a serious gun control measure passed in the Illinois state legislature, sometime in the lates, [when Obama was a state senator].
Obama had pledged his support for the gun control bill, and he said he would come to the committee hearing. And this man wrote that when the day came, they were taking a terrible beating. A ballistics expert they had put on the stand was getting raked over by the Republicans — there was some shouting, and so on. And as this was happening, he saw State Senator Obama walk past the room, stop at the door, look in for a second — and then walk away.
The community worker confronted Obama a few days later. Obama entered office in with a majority that Democrats today can only dream of: 59 seats in the Senate and a big majority in the House. His team took the measure of health care versus climate change in , and they decided health care was more ripe for the public.
Obamacare was the triumph of his domestic policy, and it certainly was the hardest fought battle that ended in a sort of victory during his eight years of domestic policy, as the Iran Nuclear Agreement was the strongest achievement he had in foreign policy.
Still, it just seems to me too much time went into Obamacare — 15 months of his presidency were preoccupied with that. And then he was looking down the barrel of a gun, the midterm election, where he lost his majority in Congress. That mattered. He never came back to climate change. Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Vol. Join Our Newsletter. More Stories. Social History. Quirky History. When humans stopped being nomadic, we could no longer walk away from our waste.
A collection of our recent stories in celebration of American Indian Heritage Month. Now a cultural staple, PTSD is a newer diagnosis. How have conceptions of trauma morphed and what does it mean for US institutions and society? Help us keep publishing stories that provide scholarly context to the news.
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