Obama TIME’s Person of Year ‘08

US based TIME magazine has announced that President-elect Barack Obama is their Person of the Year.

The decision was announced exclusively on a website on Wednesday after ‘weeks of discussion and debate among TIME editors and staff members.’

Others who were considered include U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Senator Hillary Clinton, Governor Sarah Palin, as also comedian Tina Fey, Olympian Michael Phelps, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, oil executive and renewable energy proponent T. Boone Pickens, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and Zhang Yimou, director of the Beijing Olympics’ opening and closing ceremonies.

Obama being the first Black man in White House along with all the challenges he faced and defeated, made him an irresistible choice.

“I don’t think that Americans want hubris from their next President,” Obama told TIME for the Person of the Year issue, which appears online today and on newsstands Friday. “[But] I do think that we received a strong mandate for change. And I know that people have said, ‘Well, what does this change mean?’ … It means a government that is not ideologically driven. It means a government that is competent. It means a government, most importantly, that is focused day in, day out on the needs and struggles, the hopes and dreams of ordinary people.”

TIME has always stressed that being named Person of the Year is not an honor. The designation’s definition goes like this: “The person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse.”

Others who have made it to the list in the past include: Gandhi (1930), Hitler (1938), 25-and-under generation (1966), The Computer (1982) etc. TIME’s 2006 Person of the Year was ‘You’.