DATELINE: New Orleans, Louisiana
It’s one of those probably phoney bits of received wisdom that American Idol gets more votes than the Presidential election – insert your own cynical sneer about celebrity culture here if you so wish. But it is true that the American election process is fiendishly complicated – we’ve got so many hits [...]

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DATELINE: Baltimore, MD
We’re trying not to devote too much time to sight-seeing on this trip; there’s simply too much else to do. But 24 hours in Baltimore provided an unmissable opportunity to visit Washington DC, only an hour away by train.
The highlight was not the remote, heavily guarded White House though, but the Lincoln Memorial. [...]

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DATELINE: Boston, Massachusetts
That’s how it seemed when we saw the southern preacher-man speak in Winnacunnet High School, in Hampton, NH on Monday. Officially, of course, he’s not a socialist. No-one is. The western hemisphere’s few remaining socialists were tragically wiped out at some point in the mid 1990s, when Bill Clinton and Tony Blair jumped [...]

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DATELINE: Iowa City, Iowa
As the vital hour approaches, the clamour of candidates hoping that Iowa will kick-start their push for the White House has reached new levels of intensity. In Iowa City, or ‘Berkeley on the prairie’ as a local politics professor describes it to me, the final two days before the caucus have witnessed [...]

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Our name has confused a few people already. So what does it mean? “My fellow Americans” is a phrase commonly used as the opening of a Presidential address. It has great symbolic resonance – enshrining the idealised American version of democracy, where the President is but one of many equal citizens.
Here’s Gerald Ford addressing his [...]

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