You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent.

We make an edition of the programme for BBC Radio 4, but this is a download of a special edition broadcast on the BBC World Service.

It's presented by Owen Bennett Jones.

This week we've been trawling through our records rediscovering dispatches from years gone by.

And today we go back 15 years when the United States,

as it is today, was thinking about the next presidential election. And what do the two periods have

in common? Well, perhaps this. Distrust of central government, disdain for Washington insiders,

the hope for simple solutions to complex problems.

"'Gavin Esler packed his winter coat and left the capital, Washington,

"'to take the nation's temperature with a couple who were living a classic American life,

"'self-reliant, in a log-built cabin deep in the forest.

"'The man walking across the frozen lake is carrying something in his

hand, a stick probably. Even at this distance you can see his boots kick up a light dusting of

snow on the ice as his dog, a tan-coloured Labrador, runs around. It is bitterly cold, at least

ten below freezing, with an ice wind from the north like a knife in the ribs.

He's bundled up in a goose-down parker, so fat he looks like the Michelin Man.

Everything is white and frozen.

Then the man bends down and puts a golf ball on the ice.

The stick turns out to be a seven iron, and he pitches the

ball 100 yards as the dog runs after it across the ice. This is New Hampshire, where once every

leap year the fate of American democracy is, by an accident of history, in the hands of the

eccentric ice golfer and 800,000 other voters, in the first-in-the-nation

...