Person of the Year 2008

This probably did not come as a surprise to anyone, but Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2008 is the soon to be 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama. The choice was clear; a guy who draws 100,000 people to a speech in St. Louis, who raises three-quarters of a billion dollars, who was just elected as the first Black person to serve as the president of the United States. He dominated the public interest so completely that it borders on unbelief to recall that half the people in America had never heard of him two years ago. He hit the political scene like a lighten bolt, shattered decades of conventional wisdom and overcame centuries of the social pecking order.

Opponents tried to label him as all show and no substance, but he has moved with unprecedented speed to build a solid and well respected Cabinet. And all that flash and dazzle has been replaced with a git r done attitude. He is a man about his business. He began his campaign as a talented speaker who opposed the Iraq war and a personal life story that fit everyone. But as economic events changed our priorities on Iraq and his story mattered less, the unknown Obama just kept rising. He possesses a rare ability to read the necessary and potential of each new moment and organize himself and others to anticipate change and translate it into opportunity. And by Nov. 4, the strongest party in the U.S. was no longer the Republican Party or the Democratic Party; it was the Obama Party.

The real story of President-elect Obama's year is the steady march of seemingly impossible accomplishments: beating the Clinton machine, organizing previously disfranchased voters, harnessing the new technologies, shattering fundraising records, turning previously red states blue — and then waking up the day after his victory to reinvent the presidential-transition process in the face of a potentially dangerous vacuum of leadership.