Time magazine has just released their end-of-the year issue that names their annual person of the year. And it looks like Time thinks along the same lines as Barbara Walters, because the recipient is President elect Barack Obama. No surprise there!
Time says of their choice, “It's unlikely that you were surprised to see Obama's face on the cover. He has come to dominate the public sphere so completely that it beggars belief to recall that half the people in America had never heard of him two years ago — that even his campaign manager, at the outset, wasn't sure Obama had what it would take to win the election. He hit the American scene like a thunderclap, upended our politics, shattered decades of conventional wisdom and overcame centuries of the social pecking order. Understandably, you may be thinking Obama is on the cover for these big and flashy reasons: for ushering the country across a momentous symbolic line, for infusing our democracy with a new intensity of participation, for showing the world and ourselves that our most cherished myth — the one about boundless opportunity — has plenty of juice left in it.”
Obama definitely deserves the title. We can’t think of anyone else who accomplished more this year, and he hasn’t even become President yet! But Obama is prepared, as he told Time in their interview for the issue.
On the economy:
"It is not clear that the economy's bottomed out. And so even if we take a whole host of the right steps in terms of the economy, two years from now it may not have fully recovered."
On Afghanistan:
"We're going to have to make a series of not just military but also diplomatic moves that fully enlist Pakistan as an ally in that region, that lessen tensions between India and Pakistan, and then get everybody focused on rooting out militancy in a terrain, a territory, that is very tough — and in an enormous country that is one of the poorest and least developed in the world. So that, I think, is going to be a very tough situation.
On climate:
"And then the third thing that keeps me up at night is the issue of nuclear proliferation. And then the final thing, just to round out my Happy List, is climate change. All the indicators are that this is happening faster than even the most pessimistic scientists were anticipating a couple of years ago."
Sounds like he definitely has his work cut out for him!
