The Editor's Desk

Presidential-campaign years can be tough for the word "elite." Deploying the tactics of a half-century-old culture war, Republicans tend to try to paint the Democrats (and much of the mainstream press) as somehow out of touch with the hopes and fears of the great majority of Americans. The implication is that the country is run by a kind of cocktail-party cabal. But elite, as we use the term in this issue, is more about excellence and hard work than it is birth and credentials.

Power in the early days of the Age of Obama is being shaped by three forces: a resurgence of American credibility, the global recession and what my colleague Fareed Zakaria calls "the rise of the rest"—the emergence of countries such as India, China and Brazil. These factors are sometimes in competition with one another, but that competition is shaping the way we live now, for better and for worse.

Under the leadership of Nisid Hajari, we approached the making of this list with particular care, and we hope it serves at least two purposes. First, there is the clarifying function of any kind of ranking: you may disagree with whom we chose, but in making the choices we have opened a conversation that may prove profitable. Second, we believe that Americans need to be ever more aware of what is unfolding in the rest of the world: hence the global nature of the rankings.

The list is subjective. There was no set formula; we wanted people who exerted global influence in all sorts of ways (hard, soft, political, military, economic, intellectual). Some of this power is exerted directly (Obama's), some indirectly (David Axelrod's). We considered wealth, missiles, box office. Vladimir Putin is here (at No. 9) because of Russia's geopolitical clout, but no higher because his economy is cratering. And we tried to capture trends and power shifts—from the return of the state to the economy to the rise of Pentecostalism.

Entries for the list were written by Fareed, Jonathan Alter, John Barry, Sharon Begley, Christian Caryl, Christopher Dickey, Tony Dokoupil, Howard Fineman, Rana Foroohar, Daniel Gross, Malcolm Jones, Claudia Kalb, Larry Kaplow, Wes Kosova, Melinda Liu, Daniel Lyons, Mac Margolis, Owen Matthews, Sudip Mazumdar, Daniel McGinn, Lisa Miller, Ron Moreau, Keith Naughton, Rod Nordland, Marc Peyser, Johnnie L. Roberts, Robert J. Samuelson, Stefan Theil, Anne Underwood, Pat Wingert, Richard Wolffe and Jennie Yabroff. Jonathan Darman, Jeneen Interlandi, Andrew Romano, Sam Seibert and Daniel Stone contributed to other parts of the package.

Please look kindly on the following cliché, but there is no original way to say that 2008 has been a year to remember. NEWSWEEK was founded in 1933, amid another chaotic political and economic epoch. Then, Franklin D. Roosevelt—governor of New York and former assistant secretary of the Navy—was coming to power, and before he was done we were living in a completely different, and better, world. Now, all we know for certain is that Barack Obama has a chance to do great things. Let us hope that on our 150th anniversary, the editor of NEWSWEEK will be able to look back and approvingly cite the Obama era in similar terms.

Obama is an admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the end of this tumultuous year seems a good time to cite something Emerson wrote in another era of transformation. In 1837, in his lecture defining a new "American Scholar," Emerson said: "If there is any one period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it." Indeed.

© 2009