President Barack Obama has his hands full with the economy at home—soaring unemployment, economists skeptical of growth anytime soon, banks and car companies on the public dole, a fight over health care reform—but the president has big fans abroad.

He's won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his reset of American diplomacy.

The Nobel committee cited Obama's intention to eliminate nuclear weaponry worldwide, engage in multilateral diplomacy, take a "more constructive" role in reducing climate-change dangers, and reach out to the Muslim world as the reasons they gave the prize to a president who has been in office only nine months and is in the middle of overseeing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I am both surprised and deeply humbled," Obama said in a speech from the White House Rose Garden."

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize—men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace."

Rather, Obama said he would accept the award in recognition of the aspirations the Nobel committee recognized in giving it to him. Those aspirations include the elimination of nuclear weapons, the addressing of climate change, and the promotion of peace and prosperity across the world.

"Let me be clear: I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations," he said.

Those, he said, were aspirations that went beyond any one leader or nation, but required the work of many.

"I will accept this award as a call to action," he said.

The last sitting U.S. president to receive the prize was Woodrow Wilson in 1919. Theodore Roosevelt also won the prize in 1906. Both were in office far longer than Obama when they got the prize.

But, “only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population,” the Nobel committee's citation read.

Still, all of Obama's efforts abroad come with at least some opposition at home and some could have a big economic cost to the United States. And the Peace Prize also comes at a time when Obama is involved in some nitty-gritty political fights at home that don't really square with the image of a worldwide peacemaker.

Things like financial reform, defense budget cuts, legislative haggling over health care, and greenhouse-gas-emissions legislation.

As Nancy Gibbs points out on the Time site this morning, the prize is more for Obama's promise than his actions. And much of his domestic audience—the people who hired him for this job in the first place—is ready for action.

"At this moment, many Americans are longing for a president who is more bully, less pulpit. The president who leased his immense inaugural goodwill to the hungry appropriators writing the stimulus bill, who has not stopped negotiating health care reform except to say what is nonnegotiable, whose solicitude for the wheelers and dealers who drove the financial system into a ditch leaves the rest of us wondering who has our back, has always shown great promise, said the right things, affirmed every time he opens his mouth that he understands the fears we face and the hopes we hold. But he presides over a capital whose day-to-day functioning has become part travesty, part tragedy, wasteful, blind, vain, petty, where even the best-intentioned reformers measure their progress with teaspoons. There comes a time when a president needs to take a real risk—and putting his prestige on the line to win the Olympics for his hometown does not remotely count," she writes.

Some of the initiatives that helped Obama earn his Nobel Prize and win accolades in international political circles—such as plans to scale back defense spending and ramp up climate controls—could lead to more economic pain at home, at least in the short to near term. If those policies damage what appear to be the early, delicate stages of an economic recovery, the political fallout could hurt him as well. In the end, his standing in the court of domestic public opinion matters a lot more than the verdict of the Nobel jury.

This morning, the New York Times reports that Obama's effort to cut defense spending could spell disaster for one of America's largest companies, aerospace giant Boeing. Boeing is only the biggest loser, but the entire defense-contracting sector could see losses as Obama pulls back the reins on new weapons systems.

“The defense industry is grappling with the fact that the big increases of the Bush years are now over,” Loren B. Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, a research group financed partly by military contractors, told the Times. “And the spending on weapons is starting to melt down so fast that it will be difficult for most companies to compensate by adding revenue from other sources.”

But the climate-change leadership cited by the Nobel committee could have the biggest impact on the economy and spark some of the fiercest opposition here at home.