2012 Person of the Year: Barack Obama, the President

Twenty-seven years
after driving from
New York City to
Chicago in a $2,000
Honda Civic for a job
that probably wouldn’t
amount to much,
Barack Obama, in
better shape but with
grayer hair, stood in
the presidential suite on the top floor
of the Fairmont Millennium Park
hotel as flat screens announced his
re-election as President of the United
States. The networks called Ohio
earlier than predicted, so his aides
had to hightail it down the hall to join
his family and friends. They
encountered a room of high fives
and fist pumps, hugs and relief.
The final days of any campaign can
alter the psyches of even the most
experienced political pros. At some
point, there is nothing to do but wait.
Members of Obama’s team responded
in the only rational way available to
them — by acting irrationally. They
turned neckties into magic charms
and facial hair into a talisman and
compulsively repeated past behaviors
so as not to jinx what seemed to be
working. In Boca Raton, Fla., before
the last debate, they dispatched
advance staff to find a greasy-spoon
diner because they had eaten at a
similar joint before the second
debate, on New York’s Long Island.
They sent senior strategist David
Axelrod a photograph of the tie he
had to find to wear on election night:
the same one he wore in 2008.
Several staffers on Air Force One
stopped shaving, like big-league
hitters in the playoffs. Even the
President succumbed, playing
basketball on Election Day at the
same court he played on before
winning in 2008.
( Inside the White House : Never-
Before-Seen Photos)
But now it was done, and reason had
returned. Ever since the campaign
computers started raising the odds of
victory from near even to something
like surefire, Obama had been
thinking a lot about what it meant to
win without the lightning-in-a-bottle
quality of that first national
campaign. The Obama effect was not
ephemeral anymore, no longer
reducible to what had once been
mocked as “that hopey-changey
stuff.” It could be measured — in
wars stopped and started; industries
saved, restructured or reregulated;
tax cuts extended; debt levels
inflated; terrorists killed; the health-
insurance system reimagined; and
gay service members who could walk
in uniform with their partners. It
could be seen in the new faces who
waited hours to vote and in the new
ways campaigns are run. America
debated and decided this year:
history would not record Obama’s
presidency as a fluke.