With less than three weeks left until the Iowa caucus on 3 January (and a whopping 46 weeks until the actual election itself in November) the candidates on both sides are desperately jockeying for position. If you can lock up Iowa and New Hampshire, you get the much-vaunted ‘big mo’(mentum), which may sound silly, but it’ll get you plastered over every TV news bulletin for free, morning, noon and night.

Excitingly, no-one has anything locked up yet, on either side. Mike Huckabee continues his surge on the Republican side, while the Democrat race in Iowa is getting really pretty intimately close: though you can forgive Obama and Clinton huddling together for warmth on 27.3% of the vote when it’s as cold as it is.

By far the best way to get a first impression of the candidates on each side is to watch the CNN/YouTube debates: they are helpfully segmented into ADD-friendly five-minute questions asked by members of the public, so that you can pick and choose what matters to you (gun control? Iraq? Abortion? Iraq? Health-care? Iraq? Yankees or Red Sox? Um, Iraq?).

Republican debate
Democratic debate

As for who’s leading the pack at the moment, Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani may be out in front in the national polling, but that’ll all look rather different if they lose out to Obama and Huckabee respectively in the Iowa caucus. It may sound like a scene from a cheap east-end gangster film, but right now everyone’s after big mo’.