America: President George Bush likes to think of far-flung allies as regional "sheriffs", the term he used this week for Australia's John Howard. At home he has his "rangers". That's what he calls anyone who has raised more than $200,000 for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign.
There are 100 rangers as of now, with real estate and construction bosses and Wall Street executives predominant on the list.
The rangers include Richard Egan, the former US ambassador to Ireland, who left his post early and is clearly worth much more to Bush in Massachusetts this year than in Dublin.
Supporters who raise $100,000 are called "pioneers". During the 2000 election Bush had only pioneers, one of whom was the yet-to-be-prosecuted former Enron boss, Kenneth "Kenny Boy" Lay (he doesn't feature this time).
With soft money from companies banned by a new law, and individual contributions limited to $2,000, election funds are raised at exclusive invitation-only dinners. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney appear at these and give valuable access to supporters, whose cheques are "bundled" and credited to the host.
The Bush-Cheney nationwide tour has so far pulled in $70 million of the $85 million they have raised for re-election. The President - who faces no primary challenge - is likely to rake in "a gazillion dollars", says Al Hoffman, finance chairman of the Republican National Committee.
For gazillion read $200 million, twice what Mr Bush spent in 2000 and enough to give the Republicans a commanding lead in television advertisements when a Democratic opponent emerges.
The huge size of the Bush war chest for 2004 poses a formidable challenge to the nine Democrats seeking nomination who together have raised a mere one-third of what Bush has collected in the last quarter alone.
And they are spending some of that to savage each other. Front-runner Howard Dean, who raised $15 million in the last three months, three times more than any of his rivals, has started to run attack ads in Iowa and New Hampshire. In one slot which began airing on Wednesday, he says: "The best my opponents can do is ask questions today that they should have asked before they supported the war."
In another he criticises "Washington politicians" who failed to deliver on healthcare. This is aimed at his closest opponents in the January New Hampshire primary, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Congressman Dick Gephardt of Missouri.
Both have ganged up on Dean, implying that he is too liberal to get elected. Their researchers are spending days in the Vermont state archives going through crates of public records, documents, correspondence and television tapes for damaging material from Dean's 12 years as governor.
They have already found unexpected pay dirt in Dean's support for former Republican house speaker Newt Gingrich's budget in the 1990s.
Gen Wesley Clark meanwhile is under fire for his earlier praise for Bush, and Gephardt is accusing Dean and Kerry of being anti-labour. The in-fighting is worrying the Democratic estabishment.
Bill Clinton warned this week that they should walk a fine line as they squabble over who is the real Democrat. "We can't win if people think we're too liberal," the former president told American Prospect magazine.
"But we can't get our own folks out if people think we have no convictions. So the trick is to get them both."
He urged candidates not to say "I'm a real Democrat and the other one's not". One of the nine who is not capable of saying anything at the moment is Wesley Clark. His voice gave out just as he was getting his five-week campaign off the ground. A viral infection and laryngitis left him practically speechless, which will put him at a big disadvantage at the Democratic debate in Deitroit tomorrow.
At Concord High School on Thursday he cancelled a talk and held a listening session instead, so quiet that students in the vicinity were able to continue studying undisturbed.
The first big test for the Democrats comes in 12 weeks at the Iowa caucus, but three of the leading candidates opted this week to save the expense and not to take part.
Wesley Clark, Senator Joseph Lieberman and Senator John Edwards decided to save some precious funds and to ignore the state which is the earliest, but not always the most reliable, bell-wether of candidate standing.
It is a big gamble for them. By cultivating Iowa in 1976 an obscure Georgia governor, Jimmy Carter, was able to get a big enough bounce to go on and win the nomination and the presidency. This time the dynamics are different. In Iowa and New Hampshire Dean, Gephardt and Kerry, all favoured near-locals, will fight it out. The two losers will almost certainly be written off.
A week later, on February 3rd, the action moves south when seven states hold primaries: Arizona, Delaware, Missouri, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma and South Carolina. This is the first time so many states have scheduled primaries so soon after New Hampshire.
Edwards, Clark and Lieberman see this "Super Tuesday" as their chance to emerge at the head of the pack. They hope that if, as expected, Dean wins in the north, the voters will look for an alternative "stop-Dean" candidate on the grounds that the former Vermont governor is unelectable against Bush and that they will favour whoever did reasonably well in New Hampshire - other than Kerry or Gephardt.
Al Gore used this tactic in 1988 to beat Michael Dukakis, that year's New Hampshire winner, but he lost in the long run and Dukakis went down in flames against the elder George Bush.
So what is Al Gore up to these days? The former vice-president is planning to invest $70 million in an all-news cable channel aimed at the under-25 crowd. He says he is definitely not running again. Gore does not want to risk repeating the 2000 campaign about which he said recently: "You know you win some, you lose some, and then there's that little-known third category."