The president-elect is chosen as TIME's 2008 Person of the Year.
Its been quite a year for him has it not?
[update] (I think the subtitle for this diary, having read some of the comments, should be: CHEER UP KOSSACKS! you just elected the first Black leader of a G8 nation. What you and he did this year should truly make you feel happy this christmas, this year we have something to be hopeful about.)
Time has some new photo's of our new President in his halcyon days at college.
Looking at them i am still stunned that we have this man as the next leader of the free world. happy stunned, of course:
Caption for the above pic courtesy of GreenMTNstate: "Yeah, baby. You're looking at the future leader of the free world."
YOUR CAPTIONS WELCOME!
Beyond this news i wanted to diary something i saw yesterday,
The President-elect nominated his education secratary yesterday as you know, after the announcement the President-Elect, Vice-President elect and new Education secratary sat down with some kids for a Q&A session:
This photo warmed my heart in this coldest of winters
After their press conference today, President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden went in front of another -- albeit smaller -- group of questioners.
Obama and Biden dropped in on a group of 12 students from grades 1 thru 4 from Dodge Renaissance Academy. The questioners this time held no notepads or recorders. In fact, they had just wrapped up learning timetables and decimals -- yet their questions were quite good, soliciting some humorous responses from the future President.
Obama told the children that his daughters will be starting in a new school when they move to Washington, DC and said it will be an exciting time for his whole family, even though they have to move away from their hometown.
“You know I'm going to miss Chicago. I'm going to have to come back here. I still have a house on the South Side and we'll be coming back here often.”
When asked by one of the children if he is going to have four (whole) rooms in the White House, Obama chuckled, “You know the White House is pretty big I think we have even more than four rooms.”
Obama said he is not going to use all the rooms in the White House, “I'll have my bedroom, and the White House has a pretty good office for the President. It's an oval shaped office so they call it the Oval Office.”
It is so like him to teach 8 year olds about Social Security!
A child inquired why some bus companies weren’t letting senior citizens ride for free anymore.
“When you get older sometimes you don't have a lot of money because you're not working anymore. And it's really important that those of us that they took care of that we're there for them. And that's why Social Security is so important, that's a way that we make sure senior citizens have money. That's why we should have programs to make bus programs and transportation cheaper for them,” Obama responded.
Here are the humorous exchanges:
Kid: I’ve been learning timetables.
Obama: Timetables? Well that's very good to learn. Decimals? Man, Joe doesn't even know his decimals I don't think.
Biden: Timestables. I'm not bad at but decimals? Woah!
And during a conversation later...
Another kid: We've been learning about multiplication and division with our decimals.
Obama: With decimals? Man! (Obama hits Biden on the back.) He can't even do decimals without the multiplication and division!
And again at third conversation later Obama admits that maybe it is HE who actually isn’t the best on decimals...
Obama: All of you are learning. If you're reading and you know your math, your decimals, your fractions and you know later on you're going to be learning about history and science. If you're learning all that stuff you're going to be able to get a good job and you're going to be able to help create new things that people use and that's what makes the country strong. And that's going to be one of my highest priorities.
Biden: And you may be President one day. (Biden puts arm on Obama's shoulder.)
Obama: That's possible. Although I don't know how I did on decimals.
Merry Christmas Kossacks, and Happy Holidays.
(this is from last year)
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