KING’s Person of the Year: Hillary Clinton

People probably made too much of the 50 Cent endorsement. After all, to anyone paying attention, it should have come as no surprise: He was just one in a chorus of millions, cultlike in their zeal and deep-pocketed in their support. They brandished posters and artsy T-shirts, they held rallies and graffitied mailboxes. They were everywhere, moved by a junior senator who was exciting voting blocks that hadn't cared about the primaries in, well, ever.

It was also historic—groundbreaking, even; never before had someone who looked like this senator come so close to securing their party's nomination, and with such a liberal platform. Naturally, celebrities rushed to show their support. Magic Johnson, for instance, had already beat Curtis to the punch. Timbaland, meanwhile, one-upped both of them, hosting a fundraiser in his own home, lining that campaign's coffers with almost a million bucks' worth of donations.

So yes, people probably made too much of the 50 Cent thing. Here was a charismatic, well-spoken senator with brilliant takes on the economy and health care, and a pledge to fight for low-income families, women, African Americans and Latinos in a way perhaps no other candidate had. So why wouldn't 50 Cent show his support?

The big deal, of course, was that the junior senator he was backing was from New York, not Illinois; was white, not black; was a woman, not a man. Indeed, in the early part of the contest between senators Clinton and Obama, voters were all too quick to turn it into a gender-versus-race thing, as if that kind of thinking would get us anywhere. This did little but obscure the reality that deciding between the two of them was actually a really good problem to have. Both would shatter the status quo, wrest a position away from the old-white-dude establishment and move us forward as a country.

Now that Barack and Michelle are packing their boxes for Pennsylvania Avenue, we think it's high time we salute the woman who pounded the 18 million cracks into that glass ceiling. No, this isn't an after-the-fact endorsement any more than it is a slight on Obama (who we—and now 50 Cent—have been rooting for all along). But KING believes in giving credit where credit is due. So here's why Hillary Clinton is our Person of the Year.
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