Tales from the Trail

It must be more than a little frustrating to win the Nobel Peace Prize for your best intentions — ridding the world of nuclear weapons – and then struggle to even get the START Treaty ratified this year. Not surprising, then, that President Barack Obama told his deputy to work “day and night” to get this thing through.

But whatever the temptation to throw a little egg on the president’s face, many security analysts still find it amazing to see Republicans blocking a treaty that the U.S. military so strongly backs. Welcome to bipartisan Washington, again, I guess.

Despite the uneven start to the week, Wednesday was not a bad day for Obama by any means.

The president was able to celebrate GM’s successful blockbuster initial public offering, by implication a victory for his controversial bailout of the automobile industry. The offering cut the government’s stake in the company to 26 percent from 61 percent and raised more than $20 billion, with investors betting on a positive future for the automaker which so nearly went out of business. Obama said taxpayers would end up recovering more from General Motors than his administration spent on the bailout, adding that a million jobs were saved and many more were now being created.

Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will travel to auto town Kokomo, Indiana next week to celebrate. The rescues of the banking and auto industries certainly didn’t make great politics in the midterm elections, but with much of the money coming back to the public purse, “bailout” might not be such a poisonous word in the 2012 campaign.

When President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize last October it caught most by surprise and sent his lawyers scurrying to quietly make sure that the president could receive the prestigious award without running afoul with the U.S. Constitution or federal law.

A provision in the Constitution, known as the Emoluments Clause, bars the receipt of any present, emolument, office or title of any kind from a “King, Prince or foreign State”.  When the Nobel prize was established more than a century ago, Alfred Nobel’s will specified that the recipient of the peace award was to be chosen by a committee of five people elected by the Norwegian parliament known as the Storting.

However, Justice Department lawyers told the White House in a 13-page legal memorandum — sent to the White House counsel last December and released late Thursday — that the U.S. Constitution and federal law did not bar Obama from receiving the prize.

President Barack Obama did more than collect his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. Besides the trumpet fanfare, the black-tie festivities, the pomp, the circumstance and of course the speech, he unveiled what Washington-watchers are calling the Obama doctrine. But what is it, exactly?

A quick online search shows an early mention of the Obama doctrine in March 2008, when Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton were still slugging it out for the Democratic presidential nomination. The American Prospect cited Obama speeches starting in January of that election year and talked to Obama’s foreign policy team to get an idea of what the future president’s world view might be. One key quote from the candidate on the Iraq war was seen as defining the doctrine: ”I don’t want to just end the war, but I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place.”

“An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda,” The American Prospect said. “Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It’s both and neither — an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.”

Cheering crowds greeted U.S. President Barack Obama in Norway as he received one of the world’s great honors but at least one person was there to ensure that the pomp and circumstance of winning the Nobel Peace Prize did not go to his head.

When her husband, who is not only president but a best-selling author, wrote seven lines of text in the guest book at the Nobel Institute on Thursday, first lady Michelle Obama asked if he were writing a book, and then commented as she prepared to write her entry: “Mine won’t be as long.”

Obama joshed gently back: ”She will resist writing something sarcastic since this will be recorded for the future.”

President Barack Obama can duck a question with the best of them, but when he was asked about the arrest in Pakistan of five allegedly home-grown U.S. jihadists, he seized the opportunity to damp down a potential backlash against American Muslims and praised the community for its “fierce patriotism.”

“What has been remarkable over the course of the last eight, nine years since 9/11 is the degree to which America has reaffirmed the extraordinary contributions of the Muslim American community,” he told a brief press conference during his Nobel Peace Prize visit to Oslo.

Pakistani officials said the five young men, students in their 20′s from northern Virginia who were detained in a city called Sargodha to the southeast of the capital Islamabad, appear to have been intent on “jihad.”

For a man who just won the Nobel Peace Prize, President Barack Obama didn’t look all that happy as he strode to the lectern in Oslo. He had that downturned smile that was almost an acknowledgement of all the critics who say the award is premature — especially for a commander-in-chief who has just vowed to send 30,000 more U.S. troops into harm’s way in Afghanistan.

The speech itself didn’t make much of a splash on morning television in Washington. None of the major TV networks carried it live, though CNN did, cutting away from Obama from time to time to show an audience listening attentively, with a few eyelids drooping. But viewers didn’t have many options if they wanted to see the speech as it happened. They could see a blink of Obama sandwiched in between the televised feature stories — Dillie the Deer, a taped interview with first lady Michelle Obama, a duel interview with Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman to promote their new movie.

The Washington Post ran a live feed on its Web site; after the speech ended, there was a story and a photo slide show. The New York Times posted a text of the address. The Drudge Report – a one-stop online gateway for some in Washington — ran two small headlines about the Nobel ceremony (“Obama defends US wars as he accepts peace prize…” and  ”Norwegians Incensed Over Obama Snubs…”) over the main story. Just after the speech it was “SNOW DRIFTS TO 15FT!” but later it changed to “DEMS TO LIFT DEBT CEILING BY $1.8 TRILLION!”

Maybe he does walk on water…

President Barack Obama, having barely cut his teeth in office after nine months, has joined the rarified club of Nobel Laureates that includes the likes of  Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. Even Gandhi, despite being nominated five times, never made the list.

As with anyone who reaches the impossible dream early on, the question is: what next? He’s 48 years old, has more than three years left at the White House, how does he top this?

Obama said he was as surprised as anyone.

“Let me be clear, I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations,” he said in the White House Rose Garden.

Even before sunrise in Washington, tongues were wagging over the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s choice of President Barack Obama to receive this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. And the big question — aside from whether a first-term president in his ninth month in office has done enough to deserve the award — was, what was the committee thinking?

We know what they say they were thinking. Geir Lundestad, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, told ABC’s “Good Morning America”: “When we have a person whose ideals are so close to the ideals of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, we wanted to give whatever support we could to continued action in these fields.”

But if you read the official announcement, it sure sounds like it translates to: Obama isn’t George W. Bush.

U.S. President Barack Obama has won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said Obama had been awarded the prize for his calls to reduce the world's stockpiles of nuclear weapons and work towards restarting the stalled Middle East peace process.

The committee praised Obama for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

"Very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future."