He was the new, not-a-war-fabricating-criminal American president. That’s it. It shouldn’t be enough imho, but nobody claimed that what I think matters here. Lots of people had renewed hope and optimism, including the Swedish governing body over the Nobel Prizes, based on his not being Bush. Eight years later, that hope and optimism didn’t pay out the way people anticipated, so I personally would suggest that the committee spoke too soon on the topic. But I do remember the peace I felt with that hope and optimism, so there’s that, I suppose. And watching the proto-MAGAs in my office lose their mind at the actions of an independent, private, Swedish organization’s actions as though they deserved a say in the matter was entertaining.

He took the humans out of one side of modern war. Obviously. So now it’s 50% done, now we just need to take away the villagers he was bombing, and there’ll be no more death and destruction anymore. That’s a huge progress.

The timing of Obama’s award was very bizarre because he was approving all of the drone strikes in Pakistan at the very same time he was winning that award. There was never a war with pakistan, those drone strikes were surely in violation of international law and certainly not peaceful, and some of them blew up wedding processions and whatnot, killing children and women and random men who were not at all involved in any kind of violence.

It was somewhat surreal to read the newspapers at the time. I think many Democrats loved him because he was well spoken and not horrible, and the Republicans who hated him already hated him, so maybe not that many people were interested in discussing why he got this award that he didn’t deserve.