Yes, yes, I realize that the end of the year is six weeks away, but speculating is just so much fun. The problem this year is that the biggest names in the news are mostly noted for failures rather than dynamic successes. (It should also be mentioned that according to Andrew Sullivan’s posting about a recent discussion he had on the subject , they probably won’t choose a generic class of people since they chose “the Soldier” last year.)
Bush: Did nothing while Iraq burned.
Kerry: Lost an election he should have won.
Rove: Interesting idea, but is he visisble enough? What percentage of people even know who he is?
Allawi: Hasn’t done much besides offering platitudes.
Al Sadr: Got his ass kicked in the end, besides which Time seems to have given up on choosing bad guys.
Reagan: A possibility, but he was out of public life for a long time before he died.
Brando: Probably not famous enough to get the cover spot just for dying. (Same goes for Ray Charles.)
Reeves: He would be a very politically correct choice.
Obama: He gave a nice speech and attracted a lot of attention, but he didn’t really do anything that required effort.
John O’Neil if they wanna make the case that he derailed Kerry.
I’d pick Michael Moore and Glenn Reynolds (or some other big blogger), as symbols of a change in the way political news/opinion is formed. But obviously, Time won’t do that…
They did The Whistleblowers the year before that, so they’re not totally adverse to doing consecutive years of generic people.
Christopher Reeves is interesting, but I don’t think they’ve ever done a posthumous POY.
No one person has arisen in Iraq that could really be said to be the central player. If the Times was honest, they’d choose the Iraqi Insurgent, but like the OP said, they don’t choose bad guys anymore.
Something relevant to the election, perhaps The Conservatives or The Evangelicals.
Ariel Sharon, for championing the new stategy of unilateral disengagement with the palestinians.
Maybe something like the “The Spin Doctors” and have Karl Rove, Joe Trippi and others who played an important roll in the 2004 election. You might even be able to fit bloggers in under the same heading. This is my favorite idea, as it would be a way to reference the election (probably the biggest story of the year) without doing Bush a second time in 4 years.
Arafat was a co-winner (along with Rabin, Mandela, and de Klerk) in '93, but more importantly, the first article says that the person must be alive. How they would justify giving to the Earth, the Computer, or Jesus or Muhammad is beyond me. A shared award between Gibson and Moore isn’t the worst idea. If I got a vote, I’d pick Jon Stewart over everyone else they mentioned.
Here is the full list from Wikipedia. The non-individual and non-human Whatevers of the Year:
1937- Chiang Kai-Shek and Soong May-ling
1950- The American Fighting-Man
1956- Hungarian Freedom Fighter
1960- U.S. scientists
1966- Twenty-Five and Under
1968- Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, William Anders
1969- The Middle Americans
1972- Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger
1975- American Women
1982- The Computer
1983- Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov
1988- Endangered Earth (“Planet of the Year”)
1993- Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk, Yasser Arafat, and Yitzhak Rabin
2002- The whistleblowers: Cynthia Cooper of Worldcom, Sherron Watkins of Enron, and Colleen Rowley of the FBI
2003- The American Soldier
So Time apparently has a proud and long-standing tradition of not sticking to its own rules (and let’s not even get into choosing Rudy over Bin Laden in 2001, which was a transparent cop-out).
I’d have to put money on Bush, or maybe Condi Rice now that’s she’s nominated as Sec of State. I don’t see what Arafat did of importance this year other than die.
Theo van Gogh as an example of the consequences of the march of Islamism. He’s dead though, so they’d have to go with Ayaan Hirsi Ali – also a more positive choice.
An unnamed Chinese entrepreneur. The Chinese economic boom is probably the most important thing happening in the world today.
The EU. For the recent big enlargement.
The blogger. For the new vigour they bring to democracy.
Jacques Chirac. To piss of the conservatives. L’amour violent, heh.
Looking through the list of past selections, they rarely choose a US president for being elected to a second term. They also tend to choose people for “hopeful” reasons. So I don’t think it will be Bush, as his main activities this year were winning the election and fighting a war.
I like “The Advisors” idea, but I don’t think it should be gov’t advisors like Condi (they were more influencial in 2003, during the buildup and follow through to the war) but campaign advisors like Rove.
Something to awknowledge the Indian and Chinese economic booms is a good idea, but it’s hard to figure out what person or group of people to finger as most responsible for this. Hu Jintao maybe?
Obama has done nothing but win an easy campaign against a raving lunatic and make a speech, it won’t be him.
I still think the honest choice would be The Iraqi Insurgent, no one else has been as influencial on world events this year. The fact that Times has basically voided all “not friendly” choices kind of kills some of the interest I’d have in thier selection.
They’ve only had one Planet of the Year, I hear Venus is having a good year, maybe it will win.
