DATELINE: Austin, Texas
So tonight is George W. Bush’s final State of the Union speech then, which the former Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich decided to mark by trying to impeach the President. The wag. Sadly he has just announced he is postponing this bit of political fun for a little while longer.

Either way, Kucinich is not [...]

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DATELINE: Houston, Texas

Obama cleaned up in South Carolina last night. Most of the mainstream media’s talking heads will spend the next week prattling on about the significance of the black turn-out, and whether Obama’s success will be replicated in states with smaller African American communities. Please ignore this prattling.
“It’s not about colour, it’s generational” said [...]

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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: Tallahassee, Florida
In our unstinting quest to unearth at least one Republican during this trip, we made south from beautiful, ghostly Savannah, Georgia, hoping to see John McCain speak on Monday afternoon in Jacksonville, Florida (Florida’s hugely important primary is on 29 January). The dour, flyover-scarred city is the largest in the United States, and [...]

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DATELINE: New York, New York
“There are three types of people in America right now: people who get it, people who don’t, and people who are insane”.
Right. And how will these groups be voting?
“Obama, Clinton, and Republican respectively.”
Alfie grins. Like many of the young professionals gathered in Union Square in Manhattan, he likes Obama’s youthful dynamism. [...]

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