Add a global television audience to the foreign policy decisions of George Bush's first term in office and there can be no doubt that today's inauguration ceremony will be the most widely watched in the history of the US presidency.
A Bush inauguration is a mix of pageantry, solemn oaths and cowboy-booted balls. The centrepiece this time around will be a 17 minute presidential speech. Mr Bush can say as little or as much as he likes here – George Washington's second was 135 words, William Henry Harrison delivered 8,445 words in an ice storm and died of pneumonia soon after – but he is expected to use the platform to set out his second term vision.
Understandably, that makes some nervous as Mr Bush prepares to spend the "political capital" he said he earned in the election. Democrats in the US are expecting an assault on social security and worldwide there is some trepidation about what the next four years will bring. Today's Guardian leads on a BBC commissioned poll that finds 58% of people across 21 countries expect Mr Bush to have a negative impact on world events.
The ceremony is itself contentious. Protesters are planning to turn their backs on the presidential motorcade and a editorial in the Boston Globe has issues with the $40m price tag. Donations, it says, are yet another chance for special interests to wave money around and the paper finds something distasteful in staging such as lavish event in war time. In 1945, Franklin Roosevelt made a short speech and invited guests back to the White House for a chicken salad.
FDR is also noted as the speaker of one of the great lines to come out of an inauguration speech, telling Americans as he took office amid the 1930s depression that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself".
Mr Bush has summed up his inaugural message with one word: "Freedom". He last night explained that the US had a "calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom". Aides are probably hoping it evokes John Kennedy's inaugural statement to "meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty" to a still divided nation.
A mark of this division is that John Kerry, the defeated candidate, has not given up campaigning against the administration. He voted against Condoleezza Rice's nomination to replace Colin Powell as US secretary of state, telling supporters she was the "principal architect, implementer, and defender" of policies that had made the US less secure and alienated allies. He is also hosting a Replace Rumsfeld petition on his website.
Republican loyalists will swarm Washington to mark their man's success but Mr Bush, 58, begins his new term with the lowest approval rating at that point of any recent two-term US president - 49% in an Associated Press poll this month. His camp is looking on the bright side though: a piece in today's Washington Post from Bob Woodward reports that Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, believes Mr Bush's refusal to let his narrow victory in the 2000 election "inhibit him" has restored the power that the presidency lost through Watergate and Vietnam.
Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard professor of psychology, has advice for those with rather less admiration for Mr Bush.
So when President Bush puts his hand on the Bible today and begins his second term, Republicans will not be the only ones thinking about how lucky they are. Democrats will surely remind one another that the dollar is down, the deficit is up, foreign relations are in disarray and the party that presides over this looming miasma may well have elected its last president for decades to come.
At the same time, Democrats will tell themselves that they did everything they could - they wrote more checks and cast more ballots than ever before - so if the president and his party insist that Democrats now enjoy a fat tax break, then why feel guilty? And they will inevitably note that if just over half the fans at an Ohio State football game had voted for John Kerry instead of the president, a different man would be taking the oath of office today.
The formal ceremony begins at midday eastern US time (1700 GMT) and you can watch it live in the UK on BBC 2 from half an hour before. Reports and comment will follow on Guardian Unlimited.
