What Obama Needs to Do at Nobel Prize Speech

If Obama actually did what Noonan asks of him at the Nobel Peace Prize awards ceremony I will hold him in pretty high regard.

How to redeem this? That is a hard question, but here is one idea. The president will deliver a big speech in Oslo Dec. 10: white tie and tails, a formal, bound statement. The world, as they say, will be watching. He should deflect the limelight. (Can he?) He should make his subject bigger than himself. (Is there a subject bigger than himself?) He has been accused of traveling through the world on an extended apology tour. That isn't fair, but the tag is there. How about an unapologetic address, a speech, with the world's elites leaning forward and listening, about the meaning of America? A speech that shows a grounded and sophisticated love for his country and its great traditions and history. Not a nationalistic speech, not a prideful one, but a loving one.

Instead of apologizing, Obama should turn this into his American Exceptionalism Speech. He should stress the following things:

America hasn't just helped the world, it literally lit the world with its inventions, which are the product of its freedoms. The lights under which the Peace Prize judges read, and rejected, the worthy nominations? Why, those lights were invented by an American. The emails the committee members sent to each other, sharing their banal insights on leadership? They came through the Internet. Who invented the Internet? It was a Norwegian bureaucrat with a long face and hair on his nose and little plastic geometric eyeglasses? Oh wait, it was Americans. The members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are healthy because they have been inoculated against diseases such as polio. Who invented the polio vaccine, an enfeebled old leftist academic in Oslo? Nah, it was a man named Jonas Salk. He was an American.

Actually the email that the committee members used was also invented by an American named Ray Tomlinson. Americans also invented the O/S software, the email software and protocol they probably used, and even the way the data is transferred through the Internet itself. American ingenuity and scientific prowess is second to none and has been that way for decades.

It would be nice to see Obama accept the award on behalf of all the things that the American people have done for the rest of the world. It would be nice to see our representative to the world talk in glowing terms of his homeland.

If it is just another apologist speech then Obama is truly the hack Chicago lefty politician that his detractors call him. On the other hand if it is a speech worthy of an American representing Americans a al the Reagan's "Tear Down this Wall" speech then he can start to take his place among the great ones.