American Quest: Starting gun
By CNN's Richard Quest
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- It can often seem to both Americans and foreigners alike that the U.S. presidential election is a never-ending process.
No sooner does someone take office in January than we're talking about who will be running in four years' time, and the slog through the New Hampshire snows gets going well ahead of the primaries and caucuses.
But now we can truly say the election process is in high gear.
The convention season heralds the final push to Election Day that will see one man or other into the White House.
And even though we have known the candidates' names for some time, the gathering of tens of thousands of faithful for conventions that don't make policy, try not to make waves and end every speech with the candidate's name is significant.
The Democrats have had their four-day turn in Boston, and the Republicans will meet in New York at the end of August (just eight weeks before the general election, much later than usual). So we can look forward to pretty much non-stop electioneering for the next three months.
And just like the "Glorious 12th" starts the grouse-shooting season in Britain every August 12, so the first convention offers us a no-holds-barred push to Election Day.
And if it all seems a bit too much, it is worth remembering what these politicians are fighting for. They are vying to be president of the United States, and thereby the leader of the free world.
It is surely not too much to expect that Americans devote three months of attention to deciding that question -- and that the rest of us, who will feel the consequences of the man elected, watch to see what is happening?
In a single-superpower world, rarely have the rest of us been in such a position where the U.S. president does have such huge impact on our lives, however far geographically we may be from America's shores.
So next time the balloons drop, the cheerleaders cheer and you start to feel the U.S. presidential election is more of a circus than a serious political process, just remember -- what 100 million Americans do on November 2 will affect us all. And even if we can't do anything about it, we should at least watch.
