Time Magazine has published its Person of the Year issue, and has shocked the world by choosing the come-from-behind candidate, Barack Obama</sarcasm>.
The issue includes Obama, four runners-up, and twenty “People Who Mattered,” including, unfortunately, that chick who wrote Twilight. (On the other hand, they included a tribute to Gary Gygax, who deserves one.)
Of those 25 people, six graduated from law school:
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.
Nicolas has the hallmark of any true leader: a capacity to take decisions and implement them. He sees a problem and wants to solve it. What’s more, he believes he can.
Second, he is prepared to think outside the box. … His Foreign Minister — the immensely capable Bernard Kouchner — is a Socialist, as are several other ministers. Nicolas has adopted bipartisanship with not only a natural grace but also a wholehearted and sincere embrace. He stands in the modern postideological mold. He wants to get things done, and he wants the best people to do them.
The Blagojevich case left Chicago — and the whole state of Illiinois — reeling. Just as the city was celebrating its hometown boy’s unlikely victory, the shocking charges against the already unpopular Governor provided uncomfortable reminders of the Windy City’s reputation for cronyism and shady backroom dealing.
Even in a life that has seen its share of tumult — she has been, among other things, a Watergate-scandal staff attorney, the First Lady of Arkansas and the nation, an ogress to the right, a New York Senator and a leading presidential contender — Clinton endured a 2008 of spectacular highs and lows. After a surprise victory in New Hampshire, it looked as though Clinton might defeat Barack Obama nationwide…. Now she is poised to begin a whole new life of ferment as Secretary of State.
It’s hard to remember now, but Robert Mugabe was once a heroic figure in Africa. Because of his work to end colonial rule, he spent more than a decade in prison in the 1960s and ’70s. But now he presides over a vicious kleptocracy in which the wives of political opponents are gang-raped, eight in 10 citizens can’t find work, and much of the country is on the brink of starvation or cholera infection — even as Mugabe’s wife declares that her narrow feet can fit into nothing but Ferragamos.
Note: all of Mugabe’s law degrees were earned in prison, or through “distance learning.”
He poked the Russian bear, and his tiny nation got mauled. But Saakashvili, President of Georgia, stood out as a beacon of hope for former Soviet states now menaced by the imperial ambitions of 2007’s Person of the Year, Vladimir Putin. Outgunned on the battlefield, Saakashvili, a U.S.-trained lawyer (above, on a recent visit to New York City), used superior media savvy to cast himself as a modern-day democratic David, fending off the monster from Moscow.
Via Time Magazine.