For Obama, There's An Easy Way Out, But...

“Obama will survive the [Nobel] award, but this will be the most damaging blow to him yet“, Ace of Spades predicts:

The floodgates open for talk-show jokes. The American public will begin thinking, “Can we maybe wait until he actually solves some problems before rushing to decorate him with Certificates of Participation and Badges of Effort? Is Barack Obama here to improve our lives, or we his?”

And they will also begin noticing Obama’s outsized ego, and worrying about further feeding that bloated, dangerous monster.

A minor actor can be perfectly average but perfectly respectable in his averageness. No one usually begrudges an average person for being average.

But if that average actor wins the Academy Award, suddenly his inadequacy becomes the talk of the town. He was neither more or less average before the award — but the bestowing of the undeserved award suddenly makes his quite-unobjectionable averageness a subject of sudden derision and his otherwise-unremarkable career the butt of a thousand jokes.

The Marisa Tomei comparison is already being made — but Marisa Tomei actually earned her Oscar. It’s not her fault that the Academy Award almost never rewards inspired comic performances, and so we’re surprised when they finally see some comedic acting they think is worth noting.

And Marisa Tomei at least fulfilled the most basic requirement for receiving an Oscar — she finished a project and did so to general accolades.

Obama has done none of that.

And his fellow Democrats know it:

If Obama failed to make headway on his agenda, some Democrats said, the award could also come to be seen as the equivalent of the “Mission Accomplished” banner unfurled on an aircraft carrier for a speech by Bush shortly after the fall of Baghdad in 2003.

Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist, said that if the job market remained sour, he expected to see the Nobel medallion featured prominently in GOP attack ads with such lines as: “He got a Nobel Prize. What did you get? A pink slip.”

“Either the economy is going, and this won’t matter, or this will be another tool in the Republicans’ arsenal to accuse the president of not doing enough,” Trippi said.

There’s a very simple solution, but nothing I’ve seen from the president leads me to believe that he has the humility to actually implement it.