Will Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize help America’s image in the world?

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The New York Times reminds us that a Nobel Peace Prize and accomplishment in terms of an agenda are two different things:

But while Mr. Obama has generated considerable good will overseas — his foreign counterparts are eager to meet with him, and polls show he is hugely popular around the world — many of his policy efforts have yet to bear fruit, or are only just beginning to do so. North Korea has defied him with missile tests; Iran, however, recently agreed to restart nuclear talks, which Mr. Obama has called “a constructive beginning.”

In that sense, Mr. Obama is unlike past recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize such as former President Jimmy Carter, who won in 2002 for what presenters cited as decades of “untiring efforts” to seek peaceful end to international conflicts. (Mr. Carter failed to win in 1978, as some had expected, after he brokered a historic peace deal between Israel and Egypt.)

ABC News’ Rick Klein, likewise, reminds us that the President shouldn’t get above his raising — yet:

Nobel Prizes cement legacies — they don’t create them. (And can you imagine a Peace Prize laureate escalating a war weeks or months after winning the honor? Will the Nobel committee want its money back?)

Not to argue that winning a Nobel is anything less than a grand accomplishment — but will this contribute to a debate over what it is that President Obama has already accomplished?

A Nobel Peace Prize is surely the kind of honor that tops a lifetime of public service — but there’s no way it’s enough to get congressional Democrats to fall in line, to bring Iran to good faith negotiations on nuclear installations, or to get the IOC to change its mind about Rio.

But either way: Suck it, Bono.