DATELINE: Portsmouth, New Hampshire

“Growing up in New Hampshire, you learn that every four years you disconnect your phone, or at the very least you screen every call – because otherwise you will never be able to stop talking politics. Politics is what we do out here, but it turns into overload at this time of year.”

Aspiring actor Jerry is a New Hampshire native, and he knows what he’s talking about. Portsmouth is a picture postcard New England port: ice sculptures in front of an elegant old church, boutique craft stores, impeccably clean downtown streets, genuinely friendly bar staff and sublime seafood. The main drag is Pleasant Street; it sure is. Transplanted onto this pilgrim’s paradise is the quadrennial electoral circus: in each waist-high pile of snow, cleanly shovelled into street corners, are spiked between five, ten, indeed up to twenty competing candidate lawn signs. There’s less than 48 hours til the polls open, and in the local Obama HQ (best homemade poster: ‘Santa For Change’) the lights are still on at 10pm on a Sunday night.

Meanwhile, away from the real world, both sets of candidates have been debating on national TV over the weekend. It wasn’t pretty.

“I’ve been in hostage negotiations that are more civil than this…”

Bill Richardson was trying to lighten the mood, but it’s not even clear that he was joking. The Democratic debate got UGLY. Hillary went after her rivals who were “raising false hopes about change”. False hopes. Most of Barack Obama’s campaign posters actually read ‘Hope’ where they would normally say ‘Obama’: he’s literally tried to make himself synonymous with the word, and this wasn’t a very subtle attack from Hill.

Meanwhile Huckabee was on Fox News talking to Hannity and Colmes, explaining why he was not going to punish the children of illegal immigrants by excluding them from American education: “if you rob a bank, we don’t go out and arrest your children”. Hannity looked like he thought that actually, maybe this would be a good idea as well, but didn’t want to say so.