Yes, I hate awards. In my own experience, awards have only inflated my ego, and has not led me to become more productive or passionate about the things I excel at.
It made me complacent and less likely to go above and beyond at work, possibly because I have the feeling that I've already "reached it", whatever that means.
The piece price is awarded by a committee selected by the political parties of Norways Parlament - for Americans, you can think of this as the Democratic Party in an (almost) mono-ethnic white small 5mil country.
Alfred Nobel set it up such because he thought Norwegians would be more peaceful than Swedes. The science and literature prices are given by the (nonpolitical) Swedish royal academy. This is the reason why the peace price is so different from the other prices.
I'm not sure if you consider Obama to be unique or are being a bit ironic...
You know among the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize have been Henry Kissinger, Mikhail Gorbachev, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Yassir Arafat, Jimmy Carter, FW de Klerk...?
>All of which earned their prize AFTER their political achievements
Rabin and Arafat earned their prize AFTER their achievement of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
"We have not given the prize for what may happen in the future. We are awarding Obama for what he has done in the past year. And we are hoping this may contribute a little bit for what he is trying to do," noting that he hoped the award would assist Obama's foreign policy efforts. Jagland said the committee was influenced by a speech Obama gave about Islam in Cairo in June 2009, the president's efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation and climate change, and Obama's support for using established international bodies such as the United Nations to pursue foreign policy goals.[11] The New York Times reported that Jagland shrugged off the question of whether "the committee feared being labeled naïve for accepting a young politician's promises at face value", stating that "no one could deny that 'the international climate' had suddenly improved, and that Mr. Obama was the main reason... We want to embrace the message that he stands for."
The description more or less applies to a lot of recipients, so it could mean Obama, or it could be intentionally a set up for those who think Obama was the only one.