Note I speak as an Obama supporter!
Will pundits on the left have the guts to point out that the emperor has no clothes? This kind of outcome just reinforces the paranoid fantasies of the far-right: that Obama's Harvard magna is fake, that the World Government has been grooming him for leadership since his student days, that Bill Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father, etc.
Speaking more broadly, it seems to me that our obsession with prizes (an offshoot of winner-take-all culture) is unhealthy, and that prizes these days are less and less correlated with actual achievement.
While my faith in the Nobel process is shaken (although commenters have already pointed out the Kissinger prize and of course there is always Modigliani-Miller ;-), my confidence in Obama is not -- he reacted properly.
Mr. Obama said he was "surprised and deeply humbled" by the committee’s decision, ... he said he would accept it as “a call to action.”
“To be honest,” the president said “I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize, men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.”
Someone just pointed out to me that this opens the door for a string theorist to win the physics prize ;-)
