It's not the first time Time magazine has put President Obama on its Person of the Year cover. Back in 2008 he earned the honor after his historic victory.
Today Managing Editor Richard Stengel explains in a blog post why four years in the White House and a second-term win make the president an "architect of this new America" and this year's winner:
Obama is the first Democratic President since FDR to win more than 50% of the vote in consecutive elections and the first President since 1940 to win re-election with an unemployment rate north of 7.5%. He has stitched together a winning coalition and perhaps a governing one as well. His presidency 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.
Here's some of what the man on the cover himself had to say in an interview with Stengel, White House correspondent Michael Scherer and Executive Editor Radhika Jones.
TIME: So we'll start right in. In fact, we're going to go so far ahead. If we were sitting here four years from now and you were looking back on what your legacy is as a two-term Democratic President — we know what Ronald Reagan did and we know what FDR did — what would you want people to say about your two terms?
THE PRESIDENT: I think 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, internationally, 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, while recognizing that the world is changing and that we should encourage the kind of growth and development in other parts of the world, but over the long term will be good for us and good for the world.
Read more at Time magazine.