Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Who Should Be Time's Person of the Year?

Jordan Fabian writes that Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (and my actual congressional representative from San Francisco) is a finalist to be Time's Person of the Year for 2009. General Stanley McCrystal, President Barack Obama, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, "the Chinese worker," and controversial sprinter Usain Bolt are the other finalists, reports Fabian.

An interesting list, but I would make a quite different list (as would, I suspect, 300 million other Americans). Noting that the person of the year "honors" at Time aren't necessarily for who did the most good during the year, but rather who had the most significant impact on the world in the past year (after all, Hitler got the "honor" in 1938, as did Stalin in 1939), I offer my list (in no particular order):
  • Barack Obama
  • Sarah Palin (it doesn't make me happy, but the movement of which she is the cynical head is still driving U.S. policymaking)
  • Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (again, it doesn't make me happy, but he's a contender)
  • Nancy Pelosi
  • Ben Bernanke
  • Hu Jintao (this being the year we all realized he's really in charge)
  • Wall Street investment bankers
Who's on your list?

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