Whether traveling around the country or in his Washington DC base, The Independent’s US Editor Leonard Doyle keeps a beady eye on the country’s low-down and dirty politics. Until recently The Independent’s Foreign Editor, he chronicles a country where George Bush exploits the politics of fear, and venal politicians are locked in a dizzying embrace with money and corporate interests and voters hardly get a look in.

He doesn’t like to advertise it but David Usborne is now covering his fifth US presidential election as correspondent for The Independent and The Independent on Sunday. Yet in 2008 he is no less addicted to the campaign circus as it wends its way all across the land than he was back in 1992 when George Bush Snr finally succumbed to a chaotically charismatic Bill Clinton (a certain Hillary at his side). His biggest ambition this time around: make it to North and South Dakota, the only remaining states he has not yet visited, preferably on someone's well-catered campaign plane.

Andrew Gumbel has been a US correspondent for the paper, based in Los Angeles, since 1998. His book Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America was published by Nation Books in 2005.