KEY POINTS:
The other night CNN's Larry King suggested to an immaculately coiffed blonde Republican strategist, the sort who can equate liberalism with devil worship without compromising her Pepsodent smile, that she couldn't wait for the end of the presidential campaign.
Her reply, a half-hearted attempt at flirtatiousness, fell a
bit flat since these days Larry has the sluggish reactions and waxy appearance of a man who has overdosed on formaldehyde.
She might've had enough but not me: I'm hooked. For my money presidential elections are the greatest show on earth, better than the Olympics or, perhaps needless to say, Rugby World Cups. It pays to remember, though, that we don't have a say in the matter.
In 2004 the Guardian forgot this golden rule. Desperate to see the back of George W. Bush, the newspaper organised a letter-writing campaign directed at registered independents in Clark County, Ohio, a swing district within a swing state, urging them to vote for Democrat John Kerry.
Some 11,000 Guardian readers, including spy novelist John le Carre and the high priest of atheism Richard Dawkins, eagerly put pen to paper.
The entirely predictable result was that Clark County went for Bush. In fact, Clark was the only district in Ohio that voted Democrat in 2000 and Republican in 2004. As a local Republican observed afterwards, the whole point of the War of Independence was to make the Brits mind their own business.
My introduction to the great race was the Johnson-Goldwater contest in 1964. Lyndon Johnson was an unelected President, having stepped up following Jack Kennedy's assassination; Goldwater was a new type of Republican candidate, a rock-ribbed conservative from the southwest who'd had to overcome strenuous opposition from the party's moderate establishment.
In contrast to the current campaign it was the Democrats who played hardball. Attack ads portrayed the fiercely anti-communist Goldwater as a crazed ideologue itching to get his finger on the nuclear button. His slogan "In your heart you know he's right" was parodied as "In your guts you know he's nuts".
Goldwater was buried, winning just six states.
Although Goldwater is often called the father of modern American conservatism and undoubtedly paved the way for Ronald Reagan by dragging the party to the right and shifting its centre of gravity from the cosmopolitan east coast to the heartland, he would have despised the Bible-bashing populism of the McCain-Palin campaign.
Goldwater believed religion had no place in public affairs and the state no place in private affairs. He broke with his party over abortion and the ban on gays in the military, famously observing that "you don't have to be straight to be in the military, you just have to be able to shoot straight".
Part of the fun of presidential elections is the primary system which gives outsiders (like Mike Huckabee) or newcomers (like Barack Obama) a shot at transforming themselves from bit players to potential presidents in just months.
The fast-tracking of leaders such as David Cameron in Britain, Malcolm Turnbull in Australia and John Key suggests that parties elsewhere are taking a leaf from the US book and acknowledging that the electoral downside of experience is that familiarity tends to breed contempt.
In the pay TV-internet age, the next fix is just a click away. While CNN has the virtue of being news-driven and striving for balance in its panel discussions and punditry, junkies can be turned off by its stubborn insistence that the US election isn't the only newsworthy event taking place in the world right now.
The misleadingly named Fox News divides the world community into three categories: the US, cheese-eating surrender monkeys (the rest of the Western world) and actual or potential military targets. Fortunately there's currently a hiatus in what neo-conservatives refer to as the Third World War, so Fox is running the election 24/7.
Although Fox calls itself "fair and balanced", its fairness can be judged from Obama's comment that "if I watched Fox, I wouldn't vote for me either" and it's balanced only in the manner of someone with a chip on both shoulders.
Watching too much Fox gives you a hint of what it must be like to live in a society in which the media is a euphemism for the Ministry of Propaganda.
Fox's token independent is a news anchor who, by the company's own admission, is paid $13 million a year "not to take an explicit point of view".
Now that's what I call putting lipstick on a pig.
