According to Samantha Power's memoirs and interview, Obama and the whole Obama administration felt the same. They felt just awkward.
Power, Samantha, The education of an idealist : a memoir, ISBN 978-0-06-295650-7
>In October of 2009, I awoke to a very different form of bad news: Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Less than a year into his presidency, Obama was receiving an award previously bestowed on Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>When I relayed the news to Cass, he looked stricken, as if I had told him someone we knew had fallen ill. The choice seemed wildly premature, as well as a gift to Obama’s critics, who delighted in painting him as a cosmopolitan celebrity detached from the concerns of working-class Americans. But there was no getting around it: come December of 2009, Obama would travel to Norway to accept the most prestigious prize in the world.
>Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes, Obama’s two gifted speechwriters, took on the difficult task of drafting the Nobel address. I popped into Jon’s tiny office on the first floor of the West Wing, and he told me that the President had decided to directly confront the awkwardness of receiving the prize so early in his presidency. He also wanted to frame the speech around the more profound irony of winning a peace prize at the very time he was deploying 30,000 additional soldiers to Afghanistan, augmenting the force of over 67,000 US troops already there.
To me it feels like the Norwegians were also fanboying (and fangirling) hard over the charismatic guy. I also find him very charismatic, but hey, it doesn't influence my job and even if it does, I'm not in charge of judging who gets a globally recognized prize...
Fanboying over the promise of Obama and also over the turning away from the Bush era Project for a New American Century, which was beginning to look like a long term US plan at that point.
It looked like a promising new era and they were not the only ones swept up in that.
Power, Samantha, The education of an idealist : a memoir, ISBN 978-0-06-295650-7
>In October of 2009, I awoke to a very different form of bad news: Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Less than a year into his presidency, Obama was receiving an award previously bestowed on Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>When I relayed the news to Cass, he looked stricken, as if I had told him someone we knew had fallen ill. The choice seemed wildly premature, as well as a gift to Obama’s critics, who delighted in painting him as a cosmopolitan celebrity detached from the concerns of working-class Americans. But there was no getting around it: come December of 2009, Obama would travel to Norway to accept the most prestigious prize in the world.
>Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes, Obama’s two gifted speechwriters, took on the difficult task of drafting the Nobel address. I popped into Jon’s tiny office on the first floor of the West Wing, and he told me that the President had decided to directly confront the awkwardness of receiving the prize so early in his presidency. He also wanted to frame the speech around the more profound irony of winning a peace prize at the very time he was deploying 30,000 additional soldiers to Afghanistan, augmenting the force of over 67,000 US troops already there.