Word: linings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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White House staff regularly get "item of interest" e-mails from the Situation Room staff. So that is how most staffers were notified this morning - if they were awake. Shortly after 5 a.m., the Situation Room sent out an internal e-mail with the subject line: "Item of Interest: President Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize." Phones quickly started ringing after that, including a call from Gibbs to wake up Obama just before 6 a.m. Five hours later, the President strode into the Rose Garden as the globe's newest Nobel laureate...
...sooner had the Nobel Peace Prize been awarded to Barack Obama than countless observers around the globe were shaking their head in puzzlement or dismay. Sure, there was the Committee's official line, praising Obama's "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." But that really didn't shed much light on why the Oslo-based committee had bestowed the prestigious honor on a President who has been in office for less than a year. As Charlotte Lepri, a researcher with the Institute of International and Strategic Relations in Paris, described her friends' and colleagues' reaction...
Maybe the prize will give him more power, new muscle to haul unruly nations in line. But peacemaking is more about ingenuity than inspiration, about reading other nations' selfish interests and cynically, strategically exploiting them for the common good. Will it help if fewer countries come to the table hating us? To a point. But it's a starting point, not an end in itself...
...when reality bites, it chomps down hard. The Nobel Committee cited "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." Some of those efforts are faulted by his critics - those who favor a missile shield for Poland or a troop surge in Afghanistan or a harder line on Iran. But even his fans know that none of the dreams have yet come true, and a prize for even dreaming them can feed the illusion that they have. (See the top 10 Obama-backlash moments...
...presides over a capital whose day-to-day functioning has become part travesty, part tragedy; wasteful, blind, vain, petty, where even the best-intentioned reformers measure their progress with teaspoons. There comes a time when a President needs to take a real risk - and putting his prestige on the line to win the Olympics for his hometown does not remotely count...