Time magazine has given its annual Person of the Year award to US President-elect Barack Obama.

Mr Obama was awarded the title “for having the confidence to sketch an ambitious future in a gloomy hour,” said the US-based magazine.

It said he showed “the competence that makes Americans hopeful he might pull it off”.

Recent winners have included Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the American soldier and the online public.

Time told readers it was “unlikely that you were surprised to see Mr 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.

“He hit the American scene like a thunderclap, upended our politics, shattered decades of conventional wisdom and overcame centuries of the social pecking order.”

Mr Obama has featured on the magazine’s cover 15 times in the past two years.

“We would have had to have had some pretty compelling reasons to not chose President-elect Barack Obama,” Michael Elliot, Time’s international editor, told CNN.

“His is an extraordinary story which has captured the imagination of people from Jakarta to Dublin to Iowa to New Hampshire.

“There is a degree of excitement surrounding Barack Obama which we tried to capture in our choice,” Mr Elliot said.

(Source: BBC NEWS | Americas | Obama named ‘Person of the Year’.)

Editorial:

That’s not surprising.  Now if this brotha wins an Oscar… that’d be impressive.  Hell, he already won a Grammy.  I think he should go ahead and vie for every award possible.  Nobel, Peabody, Pulitzer, Emmy, Tony, etc.  Why not?!