Obama, Chimerica Picked as Winners of 2009
By Kim Sue-young
Staff Reporter
With just two weeks to go before New Year's Day, an American magazine has picked U.S. President Barack Obama and Chimerica, a term combining China and America, as the big winners of 2009.
On the other hand, Israelis, Palestinians, and the US dollar were picked as the losers of the year by Foreign Policy, a biweekly magazine.
"The guy's (Obama) a phenomenon and all things considered, the entire planet is better off at the end of the year thanks to the choices he has made as president," it said on its Web site, based on an analysis by David J. Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He specializes in U.S. foreign policy and economic strategy.
Noting that Obama was working to overhaul health care and had reversed the U.S. stance on global warming, the scholar described Obama's first year in office as the "most impressive since Franklin Roosevelt."
As for Chimerica, Ruthkopf said that "in 2009, there wasn't a major challenge on the global stage that wasn't in large part defined by how these two powers chose to act."
Ruthkopf picked the G20, a group of finance ministers and central bank governors from 20 economies, as another winner, while downplaying the G8, a loser this year.
"The world has learned you can't throw an economic party without the economies that are actually driving global growth, home to the world's largest banks and the world's largest bank accounts," he said.
Israeli and Palestine were chosen as losers for having difficulties advancing toward peace.
He also picked the EU as a loser over appointing Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and Baroness Ashton as its leader and foreign minister, respectively.
"When a faltering institution picks leaders whose only distinctions are that they are the least objectionable characters in the room, they are casting a big vote for irrelevance," he said.
The U.S. dollar, the value of which continues to decrease, was also categorized as a loser, while gold was listed as a winner.
Golf journalists also made the losers list as they had failed to report on Tiger Woods's affairs for years.
"The only ones more red-faced than Tiger with the revelations that he seemed to be playing more than just 72 holes every weekend, have to be the media who cover golf, who have apparently known about the story for years but just neglected to write it," he said.