Barack Obama becomes an American president
Barack Obama's Nobel speech shows a shift in tactics and maturity in office, Toby Harnden says.

Barack Obama: While some have concluded that Obama had discovered his inner Bush or even gone neocon in Norway, what the world witnessed in Oslo may have been much more significant than that.

Perhaps it was the poll registering that a shade under one in five Americans believed he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Or maybe it was the churlish Norwegians who grumbled that he was not taking the time to break grovbrød with King Harald V, or perhaps dress up in traditional folk costume.

It could even be that his growing domestic unpopularity - which he described last week as "painfully clear" (though his spokesman Robert Gibbs described a recent Gallup poll as "meaningless" and "something a six-year-old with a Crayon could do") - is something of a liberation.

Whatever the reason, it was a different kind of Barack Obama who addressed an array of stony-faced Scandinavians in the marbled auditorium of Oslo's city hall last week. Most of his speech would have prompted little comment if it had been uttered by George W. Bush.

In fact, if the 43rd American president had accepted a peace prize by mounting a muscular defence of "just wars" and declaring that he had sent troops who "will kill" and "be killed" to a "distant land", then he would have been denounced for his bloodthirsty effrontery......

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