Time picks Vlad Putin as their man of the year.

I don’t have an enormous gripe with the pick. Campaign Spot Dad was willing to bet money they would pick Al Gore. I figured they would pick J.K. Rowling, just to make the issue a collector’s item for the teeming millions of Harry Potter fans.

But it’s reverberating a bit on the campaign trail, with Mitt Romney seems quite bothered by it, declaring himself appalled and McCain says it should have been Petraeus.

Time appears to be vacillating on whether the figure named is meant to be an honor, or whether it’s just supposed to be the figure who had the biggest impact on the news in the past year. Traditionally it had been the latter, and thus the magazine had named villains like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and the Ayatollah Khomeni in years that they had enormous impact on the news.

In 2001, I think the case can easily be made that the figure who had the biggest impact on the news was Osama bin Laden. But I could see the magazine fearing the public reaction to bin Laden appearing on the cover just a few months after the towers fell. They named Giuliani that year, who is a solid choice once you’ve eliminated the guy who created the crisis that the mayor had to manage.

Did Vladimir Putin have more influence over the news this year than Gen. David Petraeus? (Time named him a runner-up, along with Gore and Rowling.) I think the success of Petraeus is more surprising, while Putin’s power-grabs and abuses are more or less par for the course in recent years. In other words, Putin was due (and might have made a good pick last year, instead of the lame cop-out “YOU”), but I wonder if this was the year he truly dominated the news.

Looking at one of Time’s photos of Putin, I thought the pose and lighting looked familiar; now I see it’s the same photographer.