Barack Obama should have only been a runner-up for Time’s 2008 Person of the Year

By now, you all know that Time Magazine has shocked the world by naming Barack Obama its 2008 Person of the Year.  Yawn.

The real news here is who the magazine overlooked.  (And I’m not talking about Tina Fey, who horrifyingly ranked fourth in a reader poll.)  I’m talking about someone who didn’t even make the list of candidates, but without whom the rise of Obama would not have been possible: the Mainstream Media.

Only because of the MSM’s fawning coverage and refusal to vet him could Obama, an unknown politician from the most politically corrupt city in America, have accomplished this:

In one of the craziest elections in American history, he overcame a lack of experience, a funny name, two candidates who are political institutions and the racial divide to become the 44th President of the United States. …

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.

This wouldn’t be the first time that Time had named someone other than a real persons.  They have previously named “Hungarian Freedom Fighter” (1956), “U.S. Scientitsts” (1960), “Twenty-Five and Under” (1966), and “American Women” (1975), among others.

Ed Morrissey makes a great point about how the above quote demonstrates that MSM just can’t let go of their view of a racist America:

Racial divide?  Didn’t this election prove that our racial divide had moved to the past?  Barack Obama didn’t win from the black vote — he won a majority of white voters as well.  While racism will never get completely stamped out, it has thankfully faded out of our public life.  That was a prerequisite to victory, not a result of it.  Had there actually been a racial divide in our public life, Barack Obama wouldn’t have won the nomination, let alone the election.  Maybe Time should think about that.

Instead of labeling “boundless opportunity” in America our “most cherished myth,” the article should have assigned that term to the “racial divide” — with “our” referring to lefties and the MSM, not America generally.