The world’s financial system melted down. Americans had to choose between inspiration and staunchness in a new leader. The war in Iraq stabilized, while conflict in Afghanistan got worse. And then a devastating earthquake hit China in the lead-up to the Olympic games. Which individuals and forces – both good and bad – made a difference in one of the most momentous and nail-biting years in memory?

Barack Obama gave the entire world hope. Now he must affect change

IN THE LONG American presidential campaign, countless commentators noted that the world outside the US really wanted Barack Obama to win – but the outside world didn’t get a vote.

Well, we got what we wanted anyway. In the weeks since Obama’s victory, euphoria has given way to a sobering realization of his challenges, the steep grade of the road ahead and the collection of weird contradictions surrounding Obama’s ascension as leader of the so-called Free World.

He’s hailed as the first African-American to win America’s highest office, with almost no recognition that he’s 50 percent white. (So powerful is America’s idea of the “human stain.”) His win is most often compared to that of John F Kennedy, a silver-spoon politician whose life narrative could hardly be more of a contrast. (Although Kennedy was also from a supposedly unelectable minority group, Roman Catholics.) During the campaign, the son of a Kenyan, raised partly on the streets of Jakarta, was branded as an elite snob. And to repair a faltering economy and save a teetering global financial system, voters turned to a young Democrat with scant experience and no depth of knowledge of economics.

That’s a lot of reverse images of Obama, but the figures in the background are probably less black-and-white than ever before. Until recently, Americans were universally recognized as masters of the financial universe and no other country would ever catch up with them. Now they look like naïve, profligate, downright dangerous losers. Decades of lectures from Washington on human rights have been discredited by Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and nasty interrogations conducted by America’s friends in places like Egypt and Jordan. Bush and Cheney invaded two countries in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks. In Iraq alone, 4,190 American soldiers have died, far more than the 2,974 fatalities in the 9/11 attacks. The Afghan war was waged to topple the Taliban; America’s presence in Afghanistan is now fuelling their resurgence. Iraq’s invasion was supposed to spread democracy through the Middle East; instead, it’s made a Frankenstein of Shiite Iran.

That’s the scrambled jigsaw puzzle Obama will now have to patiently piece back together. He was the most influential figure of 2008 by giving Americans enough hope to use their ballots to end the most awful eight years in memory. Next month he’ll have to make his own image sharper and clearer – to start affecting the change the whole world came to believe in. – Anthony Spaeth

Hillary Clinton lost – and then partnered up with the man who stole her dream

“I SUPPOSE I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas …”

When Hillary Rodham Clinton made that remark during the presidential campaign of 1992, she got blasted for denigrating stay-at-home wives.

Those wives love her now, along with working women – and anyone of any gender who has a daughter. She lost her party’s presidential nomination, but by that point she had buried any vestigial notion that a female was unsuited for the most powerful position in the world. We looked up – and the toughest glass ceiling in the world was gone.

That alone was enough to make Hillary one of the top positive influences of 2008. But following her defeat, Clinton campaigned in all sincerity for the man who had vanquished her greatest ambition. And, as of press time, she was poised to accept her former rival’s offer to resurrect America’s devastated foreign policy and help heal the world. Clinton’s indefatigable campaign proved to Obama – and the rest of the world – that one woman’s phenomenal intelligence and capabilities could not be put to waste.

Hangover of the century

The Fed’s role is “to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going.” - William McChesney Martin Jr, Federal reserve chairman 1951 - 1970

Alan Greenspan - Federal reserve chairman 1987 - 2006

Taiwan’s Chen Shui-bian may trade the presidential office for a prison cell

WHEN I FIRST interviewed Taiwan’s President Chen Shui-bian in 2004, he was finishing up his first term, running for reelection on his anti-unification with China platform, and was anything but humble. “I will be reelected,” he told me. “I am a person that writes history and creates new chapters in history.”
Chen won reelection extremely narrowly, after a bizarre assassination attempt in Tainan the afternoon before the polls opened. That chapter has never been satisfactorily explained, but if – as the opposition claimed – Chen had himself and his vice-presidential candidate shot to get a sympathy vote, he certainly wrote himself into the history books. Even Hilary Clinton wouldn’t go that far.

As to his historical legacy, however, the current wisdom is that Chen went too far in opposing further integration with China, creating an eight-year economic slump. When he stepped down in May, prosecutors immediately banned him from leaving the island and started investigating him and his family for wiring millions of dollars out of Taiwan to Switzerland and the Cayman islands. In August, Chen finally admitted his wife had diverted campaign money worth US$21 million, claiming they weren’t going to use the cash personally, but would spend it on diplomatic initiatives for Taiwan. Come on, Ah-Bian! – Anthony Spaeth

Mikheil Saakashvili learns the hard way: don’t mess with Vladimir Putin

ON AUGUST 7, Georgia invaded its separatist-minded province of South Ossetia and the blistering response from Russia, which had previously warned Tbilisi against endangering lives in the pro-Russian enclave, brought the world back to the days of the West vs the Soviet Union. One theory was that enigmatic Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili launched the invasion knowing Russia would react – in the hope of getting faster admission to NATO, the US-European military alliance. But Saakashvili wasn’t counting on such a belligerent response. Russia invaded South Ossetia – and much of Georgia itself. French President Nicolas Sarkozy flew to Moscow on August 12 to broker a ceasefire, telling Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin the world would not accept the overthrow of Georgia’s government. “I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls,” Prime Minister Vladimir Putin replied.
Welcome back to the Cold War.

Mikheil Saakashvili learns the hard way: don’t mess with Vladimir Putin

TWELVE WEEKS BEFORE Beijing was to host the Summer Olympics, the earth shook in Sichuan province 1,500km away. The “Great Sichuan Earthquake” leveled buildings – in particular, shoddily built schools – killed at least 70,000 people and made millions homeless.
Tremors were felt minutes later as far as Russia and Pakistan. Political jitters were felt instantly in Beijing, and within 90 minutes of the quake, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao flew to Sichuan. Soon, TVs across the country were showing Wen exhorting rescue workers through a bullhorn: “Every second lost could mean lives lost!” Wen toured the province and even shouted encouragement to people trapped in collapsed buildings. People started calling him “the crying prime minister” or “Grandpa Wen” – putting a kinder and more human face on China’s leadership. He returned to the province three times more.
Without the legitimacy of communism ideology, Beijing increasingly has to show that its citizens’ welfare is its primary concern by cracking down on unsafe milk and foods or pumping US$586 billion into the slowing economy. This year, Wen Jiabao took the human face of China’s leadership on the road.

SINCE 1975, japan has had 19 prime ministers. Italy has had fewer – 15 – and in the same period of time the US has been led by six presidents.

For eons, analysts said the leadership shuffle didn’t matter in the world’s second largest economy: this was the way the ruling Liberal Democratic Party satisfied its different factions. Sayonara to that sanguine notion. The Japanese public no longer trusts the LDP so they chose the opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, to run the upper house of the Diet. That caused paralysis and a never-ending round of prime ministerial musical chairs. See ya Mr Abe! Farewell Fukuda Jr! Irashai Aso-san! Japan’s economy is now in recession for the first time since the “wasted decade” of the post-bubble 90s. Don’t look for government leadership to yank it out of its rut.

ROME'S COLOSSEUM WAS used for bloody gladiatorial games. To kick off last August’s Olympic games, Chinese film director Zhang Yimou used Beijing’s National Stadium to mount a dazzling opening ceremony celebrating Chinese innovations through the ages, such as the compass, gunpowder and the movable type press – rendered by more than 15,000 People’s Liberation Army performers. As the ceremony culminated in 44-year-old Chinese gymnast Li Ning, suspended by a wire harness running around the membrane of the stadium roof before lighting the Olympic flame, Zhang offered the awe and wondrous aesthetic of his country’s culture to a world that needed reassurance and to a nation that expected nothing less. Zhang was once asked how he’d like to be remembered as a filmmaker. “I’d be satisfied if they say this: ‘Zhang Yimou’s style is strong visual presentation in a distinctly Chinese fashion.’” Zhang did more than raise a red lantern on his country: he gave the world a whole new China. – Stephen Short

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have teamed up to save the world – and Brown’s job

AFTER SUCCEEDING THE increasing unpopular Tony Blair as Britain’s prime minister in June 2007, Gordon Brown presided over a government mired in problems, both economic and internal. Polls showed Labour Party’s approval rating was at its lowest in decades and Brown’s popularity fell with it, to the point where there was speculation he might lose leadership of the party and his job as Prime Minister. Devastating by-election results in July showed just how far the Labour government had fallen.

What a difference a global financial meltdown makes.

Brown, drawing on his 10-year’s experience as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Blair’s government, took a leading role at home and in Europe in tackling the global financial crisis. In Britain he won praise for a £400 million package of loans and guarantees to prop up the financial sector, and the British public began to see him as the man to lead them out of the financial quagmire. The Bush administration u-turned on its approach, following Brown’s lead. An unexpected win in a by-election in Scotland in November was seen as a sign that his handling of the financial crisis had turned around his political fortunes.

“My message is that we must be: internationalist not protectionist; interventionist not neutral; progressive not reactive; and forward looking not frozen by events. We can seize the moment and in doing so build a truly global society,” he says.
France’s increasingly flamboyant president Nicolas Sarkozy was quick to jump on the Brown bandwagon. Sarkozy, who became president in May and whose country currently holds the European Union presidency, has taken the initiative in Europe. At meeting of European leaders he called for a global response to the economic slowdown and “real” change in the international financial system. He, like Brown, has called for a greater role for the IMF in stabilizing the global financial system and wants to see concrete proposals to reform the financial system within a definitive time period.

Don’t we all mon Nicolas?

Twitter helped elect Barack Obama as US president. Do you know how it works?

in april 2007, a junior senator planning a bid for the US presidency signed up with Twitter, a social networking Internet site, on the recommendation of his campaign manager. When his account was established, he filled in the status line, which reads: “What are you doing?”

“Thinking the President’s word is not the last word on Iraq,” typed Barack Obama.

If hope for change propelled Obama into the White House, it was the incredibly rapid changes in technologies on the Internet and in mobile communication that put his campaign way ahead of challenger John McCain (who’s a whiz at Morse Code).

Obama used websites to send out his message, gather and rally adherents, and raise record amounts of donations. He embraced the mobile generation, loading them up with an iPhone application that received updates from campaign headquarters and empowered them to make calls to friends in key battleground states. Before voting day, his campaign sent out 2.9 million text messages (each costing US$0.10) to supporters, reminding them to cast their ballots.

Twitter was the Obama campaign’s most effective techno-weapon, encapsulating many of the new technologies now at the disposal of politicians, marketers or just about anyone who wishes to connect with lots of people quickly and easily.

In essence, Twitter is a short-message system limited to 140 characters, or 28 words, per “tweet” (which is what each message is called). Its power comes from the way it sorts and searches all those messages. Twitter allows you to follow interesting people or topics or keep tabs on pretty much anything you want to know about.

The tweets may be tiny but their cumulative power is gigantic. News on Twitter travels very, very fast. You can tweet from your computer, your Blackberry or your mobile phone. Twitter doesn’t publicly disclose its total users, but the number is estimated to be in the neighborhood of 10 million. More than 60 percent of its traffic has moved outside of the US, with the biggest user group in Japan.

Call it the Twitter-verse.

Many of this year’s biggest stories broke on Twitter, with people writing about natural disasters, Olympic events, the financial crisis, and, of course, the US presidential campaign.

In April, a journalism student, James Karl Buck, was detained while covering an anti-government protest in Cairo, and helped free himself by tweeting “arrested” from his mobile phone. Buck had 40 followers, who contacted consulates, attorneys and media outlets – who in turn sprung to his defense. All thanks to one covert SMS sent to Twitter from the back of a police van.

When Obama went to Europe this summer, he was tweeting all the way, announcing stops in Jordan and Israel, speeches in Berlin, and his meeting with French President Nicholas Sarkozy. After returning home, Obama’s frenzy of tweets (most likely now being posted by an aide) became a travel log of all the small stops on his campaign: Fredricksburg, Oxford, Dunedin, Asheville, Abington, Grand Rapids, La Crosse, Reno, Denver, Detroit.

Obama became king of the new medium, climbing to the number one position out of everyone with a Twitter account, as measured by the rating service twInfluencer.com (the Nielsen rating service of Twitter). His reach, a measurement of his followers and their followers, exceeded the nine million mark – nearly the sum total of the Twitter-verse.

Twitter set up a special webpage to showcase what was being tweeted about the election. On Election Day, Twitter users condensed headlines from across all the major news networks around the world into thousands of 140 character tweets. With a quick scan, it was possible to tell exactly what was being reported everywhere – in real time. Election Day tweets set a record: 1.2 million, up 46 per cent from the previous Tuesday, with a peak around the time Obama’s victory was announced.

Of course, Twitter had an Obama bias. McCain’s managers put him on Twitter too, although he did no tweeting himself. In the end, McCain had just 4,872 followers compared to Obama’s 119,641 on November 4th.

Twitter can’t claim responsibility for Obama’s victory. Its technology was an enabler – one of many new digital tools. What transformed the short-messaging service into one of the most powerful new communication platforms of the year was the creativity and enthusiasm of its users.

Obama acknowledged that in his final tweet of the campaign: “We just made history. All of this happened because you gave your time, talent and passion. All of this happened because of you. Thanks.” – Jay Oatway