Obama Chosen as Time Magazine\'s Person of the Year

In a choice likely to surprise few, Time magazine has named the newly re-elected President Obama as its Person of the Year for building through his winning coalition a presidency that “spells the end of the Reagan realignment that had defined American politics for 30 years.”

“We are in the midst of historic cultural and demographic changes, and Obama is both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America,” wrote Time's editor, Rick Stengel, in the new issue. He concluded: “For finding and forging a new majority, for turning weakness into opportunity and for seeking, amid great adversity, to create a more perfect union, Barack Obama is Time's 2012 Person of the Year.”

Mr. Stengel noted also that Mr. Obama was the first Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win more than 50 percent of the vote in consecutive elections and the first president of either party since 1940 to win re-election with an unemployment rate above 7.5 percent.

“He has stitched together a winning coalition and perhaps a governing one as well,” Mr. Stengel wrote. But that theory is being tested even now, a month before Mr. Obama is to be sworn in for his second terms, on issues of the budget and gun control.

Right now the president is engaged in what has to be the final days of negotiations with Speaker John A. Boehner, the Republican House leader, toward a compromise deficit-reduction deal that could bring tax revenues and spending closer into alignment for decades to come - if they succeed - and could usher in a truce in the deficit wars that have divided the parties since the early days of the George W. Bush administration. Yet success is hardly assured, and given a looming year-end deadline, many people in both parties are predicting the two sides will retreat to some minimalist fallback, and continuing fighting next year.

Also on Wednesday morning, Mr. Obama is to make an announcement about the pr ocess that his administration will follow to devise policy responses to the kind of mass murders that occurred horrifically last Friday in Newtown, Conn. One of the exclusive photos in the magazine shows Mr. Obama attending his daughter Sasha's ballet rehearsal on Sunday but writing the speech he delivered to the Newtown community that night.

The cover photo portrait shows a pensive president in a sidelong view, the shot taken so close that every hard-earned crease in his face is clear and the gray hairs accentuated after four eventful, often stressful years in what has been called the hardest job on the planet.

In an interview, Mr. Obama told Time that, “2012 may have been more satisfying a win than 2008.”

“I think it was easy to think that maybe 2008 was the anomaly, and I think 2012 was an indication that, no, this is not an anomaly. We've gone through a very difficult time. The American people have rightly been frustrated at the pace of change, an d the economy is still struggling, and this president we elected is imperfect, and yet, despite all that, this is who we want to be. That's a good thing.”

Mr. Obama said his winning coalition reflected “the much-noted demographic shift in this society,” and that one of his points of pride of the first term is, “I think I've helped to solidify this incredibly rapid transformation in people's attitudes around L.G.B.T. issues - how we think about gays and lesbians and transgender persons.”

Though Mr. Obama presumably is just at his presidency's halfway point, he said of his legacy, “What I'd want people to say is that having come in at a time when our economy was on the brink of collapse, when we had gone through a decade in which middle-class families were doing worse and worse, and the ladders of opportunity into the middle class for people who were willing to work hard had begun to deteriorate; at a time when, internation ally, we were embroiled in two wars but our leadership around the world was being questioned, that we had steered this ship of state so that we once again had an economy that worked for everybody; that we had laid the foundation for broad-based prosperity; and that internationally we had created the framework for continued American leadership in the world throughout the 21st century.”

When asked why he keeps a diary, Mr. Obama turned to the example of Abraham Lincoln, another writer-president. He said that in his own life, like Mr. Lincoln's apparently, “writing has been an important exercise to clarify what I believe, what I see, what I care about, what my deepest values are.”