What Is This World Coming To?

TIME selected Barack Hussein Obama to be its ‘Person of the Year’ some three days after Vice President-elect Joe Biden (that still doesn’t sound right) picked senior TIME editor Jay Carney to be his communications aide.

TIME says that Obama has risen to “dominate the public sphere” in his short time on the national scene. It says the incoming president overcame “centuries of the social pecking order” to become the first African-American elected to the White House.

Time is also praising Mr. Obama for the swift and business-like manner in which he has assembled his administration, beginning the very day after his historic election.

The president-elect tells the magazine there are a number of issues he hopes to resolve over the next two years, including putting the U.S. economy back on track, closing the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention camp,  withdrawing troops from Iraq, healing the sick, restoring sight to the blind and raising the dead (provided they’re Democrats.)

Barack Hussein Obama joins Irish rock singer Bono, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani, and three of the most recent U.S. presidents: outgoing President George Bush, his father George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton as TIME’s “Persons of the Year.”