So much can change in four years.
Some 16 million babies have been born in the United States since 2008, the last year the Democrats and Republicans met to anoint their presidential nominees. Kids who were toddlers then are starting kindergarten now; that year's nervous high school freshmen are beginning college or work, or at least anxiously looking for jobs.
Nearly 10 million Americans have died, including political lights Geraldine Ferraro, Betty Ford and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who bade his dramatic convention farewell four years ago.
The Iraq war is over, the war in Afghanistan winding down. Osama bin Laden is dead. Yet Guantanamo Bay still holds 168 terror suspects. And too little has changed in a discouraging economy since 2008.
The political conventions are back to ask again if we, as individuals and as a nation, are better off than we were four years ago. That raises the question, where will we be four years from now?
It's fashionable these days to complain that the party gatherings no longer matter, that they're just phony made-for-TV moments â€" speeches and sappy films and balloon drops strung together into protracted campaign commercials. That's true, as far as it goes.
AP
Romney-Ryan campaign sign is displayed inside of the Tampa Bay Times Forum at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., on Sunday, Aug. 26, 2012. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Close The conventions no longer matter in picking presidential nominees. But that's because the choosing moved from the old smoke-filled rooms and rowdy delegate halls to a months-long carnival of democracy: debates and caucuses and primary voting across the country.
The conventions are made for TV. But that means made for all to see, across America and even the world. And the audience now gets to talk back, drafting its own instant platform via Twitter and Facebook and all our other electronic impulses.
The conventions are taxpayer-subsidized political commercials. But if they were only that, few would watch. We've seen too many mean ads already. By now most voters have made up their minds about Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, anyway.
At their best, every four years, these mud-slinging, self-serving, partisan-by-definition displays rise to offer something more: moments that transcend politics.
Together, the two conventions make up a national stock-taking, a pause to remember our roots, figure out who we are and decide what's truly important, without feeling too hokey about it. Like a virtual family reunion, Americans gather around their televisions, computers or smartphones to argue or agree, celebrate the good stuff, mourn our losses and regret our mistakes, to regroup, to look ahead.
The conventions are Barbara Jordan, Jesse Jackson and Obama, their very presence on the podium insisting that the American dream no longer be deferred. And Ferraro and Sarah Palin and Hillary Rodham Clinton, bursting through doors once locked to them.
They are the thousands of Vietnam War protesters chanting outside the 1968 Democratic meeting, who couldn't be silenced by the tear gas and billy clubs of the Chicago police.
They are Robert Kennedy eulogizing the slain president who was also his big brother Jack. Nancy Reagan telling America that its Great Communicator is being hushed by Alzheimer's. Mary Fisher pleading with the nation to come to its senses and find its compassion so her children wouldn't feel ashamed someday to say out loud their mother died of AIDS.
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