It’s Person of the Year time at Time

With five weeks to go before it must declare its Person of the Year, Time magazine gathered some of its New York editors and writers for lunch with invited guests Wednesday to debate potential names in public. The consensus front-runners: President Bush, not surprisingly, along with a “generic” alternative: “The Terrorist.”

Managing Editor Jim Kelly asked for reactions to a longshot name, that of Coleen Rowley, the Minneapolis FBI agent who helped expose failures in intelligence gathering pre-Sept. 11. “Not only do you get the war on terror, but you get the whistle-blower phenomenon,” Kelly said. Then someone suggested that “99% of the readers will not know who this is,” and it was back to Bush vs. the Terrorist.

Kelly said he and other Time editors had considered Osama bin Laden a year ago, but “thought he had died” in the mountain caves of Tora Bora, and the magazine went with New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. This year, though Bin Laden himself did not seem likely to get the nod, the magazine would not steer away from spotlighting the impact of terrorists around the world, Kelly said, even if that might anger some readers. Any choice makes some people unhappy, he noted, recalling, “We had some subscriptions canceled when we named Bush two years ago.”

-- Paul Lieberman