I think it’s safe to say that nobody saw this coming:

President Obama on Friday won the Nobel Peace Prize, a stunning choice of an official who had been in office for less than two weeks before this year’s nomination deadline.

Obama won the prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced, saying it had “attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.”

[...]

Obama becomes the third sitting president — and the first since Woodrow Wilson in 1919 — to win the prize. Theodore Roosevelt won the award in 1906. Former President Jimmy Carter won in 2002, and former Vice President Al Gore won in 2007.

“Only 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,” Thorbjoern Jagland, chairman of the Nobel Committee said. “In the past year Obama has been a key person for important initiatives in the U.N. for nuclear disarmament and to set a completely new agenda for the Muslim world and East-West relations.”

He added that the committee endorsed “Obama’s appeal that ‘Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.’”

Of course, the underlying element to this story is that Obama has, to many even on the left, hardly been in office long enough or achieved enough real progress to warrant this great honor (Ana Marie Cox says it’s an award for “not being Bush.”) I think what they fail to realize is that Obama is being honored not so much for what he’s accomplished, but for the dramatic change in tone of our foreign policy since his inauguration. This morning I heard Jerry Seib on the Diane Rehm show say that this change in tone is something that we shrug our shoulders at, but the impact of which on Europeans and our allies in the world can’t be overstated. Josh Marshall says something similar (via Charles Kuffner):

This is an odd award. You’d expect it to come later in Obama’s presidency and tied to some particular event or accomplishment. But the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the ‘hyper-power’ as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it’s a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was ‘normal history’ rather than dark aberration.

I completely disagree with Michael Crowley (linked to above) who says that Obama should refuse to accept the award. Nothing would be a greater insult to the people who awarded it to him. Obama would show true grace to accept and honor the award, and the faith that has been placed in him, by trying to live up to it.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike:

There are 120,000 troops in Iraq — but by the summer of 2010 there will be 55,000; and by December 2011; practically none. There is a consideration of another Afghanistan escalation — but as part of a measure, if adopted, to bring stability and peace to a region whose volatility threatens millions. (Yes, this isn’t so convincing, even to me.) The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is heating up again — but Obama has taken risk after risk already to address it, and his bigger risks are yet to come. We probably won’t have a real climate bill in time for Copenhagen — but through no fault of Obama’s, and he’s working to mitigate its consequences. The U.S. still has the world’s biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons — but Obama never promised that he could yield nuclear disarmament overnight. Guantanamo Bay is in business — but not, insh’allah, for long.

Progressives have a unique responsibility to hold Obama to his own stated vision, and the vision that the Nobel committee honored today. But there is a difference between an incomplete agenda and a counterproductive one. And in truth, the agenda is never complete. The work goes on. But we are on a path. Fired up, ready to go.