I've always felt they should give it out like the science prizes, wait 10-20 years before awarding it to see what/who really mattered.
Implicit in that is that the prize might be given to people who turn out to be a disappointment.
In many ways this is actually a very hard prize to award, but I’m ok with that. Sure, it will fail from time to time, but that’s just human.
While that award is ridiculed outside the US too, I think few Americans appreciate just how terrifying the thought of anything like a continuation of the Bush legacy was to many people the rest of the world. We were shocked when he was elected the first time, and even more so that he became president a second time (and it doesn't matter that it was close, anything but a landslide for Gore would have still shocked us). It seemed like America had gone totally of the rails and was firmly headed into a level of previously unseen craziness.
After the election of Obama is the first time I've seen non-Americans in many larger European cities hold parties to celebrate the election of a US president.
It didn't matter that whether you believed his campaign promises or his background or that he is still far to the right of most of Europe - he was still someone who at least appeared to people to have some measure of intelligence and restraint. Someone who would at least listen to foreign leaders instead of some voice he believed to be God.
Merely by stemming the neocon tide, he was seen as a giant step forward (or backwards, to the saner era of e.g. Clinton, who was probably more popular in Europe than in the US, or even Bush senior; heck, we'd even take Reagan)
I can imagine some people may have believe that Obama's first election signified, well, Hope and Change.
But in the intervening years, we see that the Obama administration's foreign policy, at least as seen through its end effects, is scarcely distinguishable from that of GWB. The Iraq war "ended" precisely on the same schedule that GWB had put forward, we've found ourselves in an increasing number of armed conflicts, and we still seem to see the world as being beholden to American interests (e.g., countries around the world are expected to run their domestic policies such that they align with the US war on drugs).
So it doesn't seem like the Prize did very much to encourage Pres. Obama to continue on a promise of peace. And why should it? If he does continue, he's not going to get a second prize. And if he doesn't follow through, they're not going to take the prize away.
One might as well say to a child "since you said you'd clean your room, here's some candy to encourage you to actually do the cleaning".
> I can imagine some people may have believe that Obama's first election signified, well, Hope and Change.
I find that curious, though, because he went into the election with a relatively conservative platform. It's not that long ago that his policies would have made him fit squarely in the Republican party. It's presumably exactly because of this he was able to draw in such a big portion of the electorate. That, and being painted as the anti-Bush.
> One might as well say to a child "since you said you'd clean your room, here's some candy to encourage you to actually do the cleaning".
There's actual psychology research to back up the idea that giving a reward in anticipation of positive action is in many circumstances more effective than promising a reward after the fact (Influence by Cialdini covers several different approaches to this, with references) so that's not such an outlandish idea, though not perhaps with that particular wording.
In general, we have a very strong predisposition for consistency. If we are surrounded by signs that we are seen as the type of person who does X, then we are more likely to do X. But a promise of a reward does not signal we're the type of person who does X, it signals that we're the type of person who will do X when the benefit derived is perceived to be greater than the opportunity cost.
(It's not clear to be, btw., that the Peace Price to Obama even potentially had a beneficial effect on this basis; it's not like it's a lever you can pull and it'll always work as intended on every person - if you manage to do things right to trigger the effect, it improves your average level of influence)
There are at least three different levels to view this at. And thanks to the myth of the rational voter, there are plenty of people who decide that the appearance at one level is sufficient, and the cost/benefit of digging deeper isn't worthwhile.
On the surface, Obama was happy to allow people to believe something different even from what he was actually saying. Many pacifists supported him on this basis.
A level deeper, Obama was never anti-war. If you go back to the record, his only anti-war statements were specific to Iraq. He disliked the politics of that particular war, but never came out as a pacifist (contra those only looking skin-deep).
Deeper than that, we've got to consider political motivations behind his anti-Iraq-war stance. In retrospect it appears that this was largely a political position that was easy for Obama to take on because it entailed undermining GWB's (arguably illegally assumed) authority, thus shifting power away from the GOP and toward the DEMs. In this light, it's hardly surprising that he's chosen to eschew his opposition to unilateral executive power: when the shoe was on the other foot, he was able to obtain further political advantage by doubling down on the same abuses that he'd criticized just a few years earlier.