奥巴马成为《时代》周刊2012年度人物
12月19日，美国总统奥巴马被《时代》周刊评为2012年度人物。这是奥巴马第二次获得这一殊荣。
《时代》杂志总编辑史丹格当晚揭晓了评选结果，他表示，奥巴马在两次大选中均以超过半数的选票当选总统，这样的成就不同凡响，并指出，奥巴马在美国深陷经济危机时临危受命，任重道远。
《时代》称，美国正在经历巨大的文化和人口变化，而奥巴马正是这种变化的一种象征，同时也是推动改变的力量。他呼吁国人团结一致，“共同抓住美国的未来”，美国“最好的时代”尚未到来。
据悉，朝鲜最高领导人金正恩成为今年网民票选的第一年度人物。但是，金正恩并没有入围《时代》编辑部所选择的候选人名单。
自从1927年以来，美国《时代》杂志每年都会评选年度新闻人物。去年当选年度人物的是在西亚北非掀起“阿拉伯之春”革命浪潮的“抗议者”这一群体。
以下节选了《时代》周刊刊登的关于评选奥巴马为2012年度人物的文章。
Twenty-seven years after driving from New York City to Chicago in a $2,000 Honda Civic for a job that probably wouldn’t amount to much, Barack Obama, in better shape but with grayer hair, stood in the presidential suite on the top floor of the Fairmont Millennium Park hotel as flat screens announced his re-election as President of the United States. The networks called Ohio earlier than predicted, so his aides had to hightail it down the hall to join his family and friends. They encountered a room of high fives and fist pumps, hugs and relief.
The final days of any campaign can alter the psyches of even the most experienced political pros. At some point, there is nothing to do but wait. Members of Obama’s team responded in the only rational way available to them — by acting irrationally. They turned neckties into magic charms and facial hair into a talisman and compulsively repeated past behaviors so as not to jinx what seemed to be working. In Boca Raton, Fla., before the last debate, they dispatched advance staff to find a greasy-spoon diner because they had eaten at a similar joint before the second debate, on New York’s Long Island. They sent senior strategist David Axelrod a photograph of the tie he had to find to wear on election night: the same one he wore in 2008. Several staffers on Air Force One stopped shaving, like big-league hitters in the playoffs. Even the President succumbed, playing basketball on Election Day at the same court he played on before winning in 2008.
But now it was done, and reason had returned. Ever since the campaign computers started raising the odds of victory from near even to something like surefire, Obama had been thinking a lot about what it meant to win without the lightning-in-a-bottle quality of that first national campaign. The Obama effect was not ephemeral anymore, no longer reducible to what had once been mocked as “that hopey-changey stuff.” It could be measured — in wars stopped and started; industries saved, restructured or reregulated; tax cuts extended; debt levels inflated; terrorists killed; the health-insurance system reimagined; and gay service members who could walk in uniform with their partners. It could be seen in the new faces who waited hours to vote and in the new ways campaigns are run. America debated and decided this year: history would not record Obama’s presidency as a fluke.
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