Man Of The Year

Time Mag's Man of the Year of course is Barry. No brainer, even for these guys.

Score that as follows: one imploding economy, one deteriorating war in an impossible region and two versions of Armageddon — the bang of loose nukes and the whimper of environmental collapse. That's just for starters; we'll hear the unabridged version shortly.

But first, there is a bit of business to be dealt with, having to do with why you are reading this story in this magazine at this time of the year. 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.

In the Lord Voldemort category of "great but terrible things" that qualify a person for runner-up, we have Sarah Palin (for destroying the GOP) Hammerin' Hank Paulson (for destroying the economy), Chinese film director Zhang Yimou (for the terribly great Beijing Olympics opening orgy) and French President Sarkozy (for being terribly, terribly great at being French.)

Go fig.