2009 Time Person of the Year Goes to… Ben Bernanke? Not Another Award for POTUS?
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on December 16, 2009
2009 Time Person of the Year Ben Bernanke
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke? I thought either Barack Obama or Michelle Obama were a (yawn) shoo-in for the Time Person of the Year award. Strange choice, to say the least.
From IndyPosted:
While Steve Jobs and Barack Obama appeared to be the front runners for Time Magazine, the top prize went to Ben Bernanke, the man largely responsible for shaping the financial future of North America.
The Federal Reserve Chairman has been largely criticized by both left wing liberals and right wing conservatives as he’s attempted to fix the U.S. financial system collapse.
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While the move may have shocked some readers, it’s important to remember that Time magazine doesn’t necessarily pick the most popular figures for their person of the year, but rather the person who has generated the most discussion and have influenced the world or who’s ideas could influence the world in various ways years down the road.
From Hot Air:
Perhaps Time was reluctant to give it to Barack Obama two years in a row, but Obama didn’t even make the top five in this year’s competition. Ben Bernanke got selected despite having done most of the work in rescuing the financial sector last year, and despite the fact that Congress may give him their most reluctant blessing for any Fed chairman in history. In fact, as Congress looks to duck responsibility for the housing bubble and collapse it created, Bernanke has been one of their scapegoats…
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At least Obama made the “People who Mattered” list … at number 12. He’s behind Adam Lambert, Jon and Kate Gosselin, and Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Obama is eight positions below his own chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who put a lot more effort into the legislative agenda than Obama himself did. Obama made himself almost irrelevant to his own set of priorities, passing the buck to Nancy Pelosi instead — and paying a big price on both Porkulus and ObamaCare for doing so.
Somehow, I think Time’s grade for Obama came in at something less than a “good, solid B-plus.”
From Politico:
In a letter explaining the choice to readers, Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel calls Bernanke “The Good Banker.”
“The recession was the story of the year. Without Ben Bernanke, Time’s 2009 Person of the Year, it would have been a lot worse,” Stengel writes. “Bernanke didn’t just learn from history; he wrote it himself and was damned if he was going to repeat it. Bernanke decided to do the opposite of what the Fed did back in the ’30s: he would loosen the money supply as far as it would go, he would save as many banks as he could, and he wasn’t going to hector the American public about pulling up their socks.”
Stengel had revealed a “short list” of finalists that also included Apple co-founder Steve Jobs; “The Chinese Worker”; Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan; and Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt.
Grunwald’s cover story calls Bernanke “the most powerful nerd on the planet.”
“A bald man with a gray beard and tired eyes is sitting in his oversize Washington office, talking about the economy,” Grunwald writes. “He doesn’t have a commanding presence. He isn’t a mesmerizing speaker. … Bernanke is the 56-year-old chairman of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the U.S., the most important and least understood force shaping the American—and global—economy. … And ever since global credit markets began imploding, its mild-mannered chairman has dramatically expanded those powers and reinvented the Fed. Professor Bernanke of Princeton was a leading scholar of the Great Depression. He knew how the passive Fed of the 1930s helped create the ¬calamity—through its stubborn refusal to expand the money supply and its tragic lack of imagination and experimentation. Chairman Bernanke of Washington was determined not to be the Fed chairman who presided over Depression 2.0.
Related reading:
The Powers That Be: Time Magazine Announces ‘Person of the Year’ Finalists
The New Ledger, Big Government: Bernanke’s the Person of the Year, Dean Takes on Health Care, and You Have to Pay Your Mortgage
FOX News: Bernanke Named Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’
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