President Obama accepted his 2009 Nobel Peace prize in person at the Oslo City Hall in Oslo, Norway on December 10, 2009. In a 36-minute speech, reportedly written by Obama and then edited by Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes, he discussed the tensions between war and peace and the idea of a "just war". The address contained elements of the ideas of Reinhold Niebuhr, someone Obama once described as one of his favorite philosophers.
The speech was generally well received by American pundits on both ends of the political spectrum. Several noted similarities between Obama's message and the rhetoric of President George W. Bush. This was also mentioned by former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, who called it a "very American speech" and wrote that "Obama was recognizing that the great commitments and themes of American foreign policy are durably bipartisan..." A number of prominent Republican politicians publicly praised the speech, including Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat called it an oftentimes impressive speech that was "An extended defense of using realist means in the service of liberal internationalist ends". Columnist Andrew Sullivan distinguished between the Obama and Bush messages, stating that "Obama is far more conservative than his predecessor" in his views on human imperfection, reality, and war; he also linked the speech back to the tragic nature of Obama's line "the ...
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