Best of Barack

If Barack Obama is not Time magazine's Person of the Year for 2010 I will swim to seal island and back with a bag of shark food strapped to my leg. I'm that sure. But before that is decided it is for us to bestow upon Obama a far more prestigious honour - that of the Extra Virgin Person of the Year. Here are some of Obama's best moments:

1. No list of Obama's best moments would be complete without the Big Daddy itself; his inaugural speech. It was less a speech than a manifesto, a sweeping masterpiece that needed to be that good - nearly 38 million people tuned in to watch it.

2. Obama has been asked his share of prickly questions in his first year as US president and it has been his sharp, tempered responses that have been most impressive. Here, he smashes a googly on 'American exceptionalism' out of the park.

3. Many believed Obama's Nobel Prize was premature, with conservatives taking turns to argue that he had not done enough. His acceptance speech, then, was always going to be interesting.

4. For number four, we're cheating slightly by including a clip from a speech Obama made before he won the elections against John McCain. This speech on the role of faith in politics is still being talked about.

5. When Obama stepped onto the podium to address the Muslim world from Cairo, few knew what to expect and fewer were certain he hadn't set the bar a bit high. When he stepped off stage to deafening roars of applause, had he perhaps changed US/Muslim relations forever?