This is our nation’s finest moment.

As voters in Iowa and New Hampshire take us to the starting gate of our presidential selection process, we offer the world a lesson in self-governance that can be learned nowhere else around the globe.

Ever since George Washington was elected president in 1789, this nation has held an uninterrupted string of 55 presidential elections. Even in times of great crisis, our presidential elections have been a model of political behavior.

Voters went to the polls on schedule in 1816 and re-elected James Monroe, just two years after an invading British army sacked and burned the White House and Capitol.

In 1864, during the Civil War – the sort of conflict that would prompt many other nations to impose martial law and suspend normal political processes – Abraham Lincoln ran for reelection and won a second term.

The Great Depression didn’t stop the election of 1932. And during World War II and the Korean War, our presidential election process continued uninterrupted.

Even when thousands of anti-war protesters disrupted the Democratic National Convention in 1968, the party went on to pick a presidential candidate – and the nation chose another president.

All this may seem like business as usual to us, but it isn’t so in other parts of the world.

The postponement of Pakistan’s parliamentary elections after the recent assassination of Benazir Bhutto is a chilling reminder of the difficulties some nations experience in choosing leaders. Bhutto’s party had been expected to win enough seats to name the country’s next prime minister.

Scores of people have been killed in election-related violence in Pakistan, and President Pervez Musharraf clings to power by fiat. Last year, the country’s Supreme Court was about to rule on whether Musharraf, who seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999, could seek another term. But before it could act, Musharraf purged the high court of judges whom he thought would not back his effort to hold onto power. He then chose replacement judges who quickly quashed challenges to his election.

The election news is no better out of Kenya.

According to international monitors, President Mwai Kibaki stole the recent election there after pre-election polls showed him trailing his opponent. The opposition says it will challenge Kibaki’s reelection in the streets, not the nation’s courts.

It’s true that Pakistan and Kenya, both former colonies, are still in their infancy as independent nations. But so was this country once, yet it managed to hold scores of presidential elections without anything approaching the violence – and power-grabbing – that Pakistan and Kenya have experienced.

Only two presidential elections here in the past 219 years have raised concerns over legitimacy. One was in 1876, when a special congressional commission had to decide the victor after electoral votes in several states were disputed. The other, in 2000, was decided by the Supreme Court.

Even in these cases, our presidential election process bent but didn’t break – and the losers accepted defeat without resorting to violence or calls for insurrection. This is a history that people in this country can be proud of as the presidential contest gets under way.

A little more than 10 months from now we will select a new president. It’s too early to say which candidate we will choose, but this much is certain: The world can learn a lot from how we do it.