The following is a transcript of Part 1 of our podcast with Katty Kay, Washington correspondent for BBC World News America. Click here for Part 2.

Katty Kay: I'm Katty Kay; I'm going to be the Washington correspondent for the BBC World News America Program. I'll be looking particularly over the next year, at the 2008 Presidential campaign, but at politics in Washington and Washington news generally.

BBCA: Could you tell everyone a little bit about your background?

Katty Kay: I've been with the BBC, my goodness now, for about 20 years on and off, I've been a correspondent reporting from Africa, that's where I started out working for BBC world service radio, and then I went to London for a couple of years, where I became a staff member of the BBC, still with radio, and then I went to Japan, and I was the Tokyo correspondent for the BBC for about three and a half years, and I came to Washington 10 years ago, so I've covered three Presidential elections and now this is going to be my fourth Presidential election, and I have an education background, I studied languages, French and Italian at Oxford, and when I left university I had this kind of strange idea that I might try and become an economist, or at least be able to read the Financial Times with some understanding of what was going on, so I went to work for the Bank of England for awhile, and I was there for a year or so and I'm not sure whether they disliked me more, or I disliked them more, but anyway, it didn't really work out, I realized that economics was not the thing I wanted to be doing and I went out to live in Zimbabwe to work for an aid agency, and a friend of mine came out one day on holiday, and he brought him a little tape recorder, and that friend was Matt Frei, so this was when I was about 22, and Matt came out to say, 'Katty, it's crazy, here you are in Zimbabwe with all these great stories around you, you should be a journalist', and so Matt actually introduced me to the BBC and so that's how I got started.

BBCA: How excited are you to be back in the field?

Katty Kay: This is a great opportunity for me, it's been a fun three years, but I remember during the last election every now and again getting itchy feet thinking, 'I wanna be out covering this campaign', and this is really the most compelling election in America since I've been living here in the last ten years, probably in our generation, the idea that there could be, for the first time, a woman who's a serious contender, for the first time, an African-American who's a serious contender, those are landmark opportunities to be covering so it's gonna be really fun for me to get back into the politics of this campaign, um, and to get out into the field as well, I'm going off to South Carolina next week, I'll be in Iowa, you know, having a chance to get out there and talk to candidates and I think even more importantly, to talk to voters, that's what I love doing. I'll be doing some work in the studio as well, I'll be doing some anchoring sometimes but it's a great opportunity for me to get out into the field and cover the politics.

BBCA: What sort of election are anticipating, do you anticipate a mean-spirited election, do you anticipate a close election?

Katty Kay: I think it could well be a close election, we shouldn't forget that this country is pretty evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, there are a lot of people in Washington who are almost discounting the Republicans at the moment, who are saying, 'this is the Democrats election to lose' that they really have a clean shot at it and all of those things are true, but actually America's almost divided half and half between Democrats and Republicans and either side can make a mistake, I think it is going to be close, perhaps closer than a lot of people think. So far it hasn't been mean-spirited; we saw a lot of that in the 2004 election with the swift boating of John Kerry. I suspect as we get closer to the primaries, and as the race gets tighter, and the poll numbers get tighter, you're going to see more attack politics from the people who at the moment are behind because they have nothing to lose by going on the offensive, and I wouldn't be surprised if during, once you've got two nominees, next year if we see more aggressive, engaging, combat-like politics; it seems to be a trend in American politics that it gets dirtier with every election, I would be surprised if this election were an exception to that trend.

BBCA: Which candidate do you believe has been most effective in getting their message out so far?

Katty Kay: The candidate that surprised me most so far, is probably Hillary Clinton, she's run an extremely disciplined campaign but also a very smart campaign. She has stuck to a message that she thinks is the right message for the general election, whilst trying to woo primary voters at the same time, but she's never stopped from keeping an eye on that general election campaign, so you haven't seen her moved too far to the left, for example on the Iraq war in order to appease the left-wing base of the democratic party and I think that's been a very clever tactic that she stay positioned in such a way that she can go into the presidential election if she gets the nomination saying, I can be tough enough on national security, I can be your commander-in-chief as well as your President, it'll be interesting to see how well she overcomes skeptics who are both concerned about her character, who have questions about her character, there are a lot of people around this country who hate Hillary Clinton, it'll also be interesting to see what role gender plays in the election, we're facing two great unknowns, gender and race are going to both play big parts in this election and we don't quite know what those parts are going to be yet.

BBCA: You mentioned before that people had counted the Republicans out, especially after the mid-term elections, do you feel like America is shifting left now?

Katty Kay: After the 2004 elections there were a slew of books that came out about how America was shifting to the right, I remember one in particular, "The Right Nation: The Rise of Conservative Power in America", I don't think you're seeing seismic shifts either way, you didn't see a seismic shift to the right and you're not seeing a seismic shift to the left now. This is a fairly middle of the road country. I would say that America tends to be more conservative socially than most European countries, I notice that all the time whenever I travel back to Europe, I come back here and I'm struck again by the fact that this is a more socially conservative country, so issues like religion, gay marriage, are much stronger issues in politics here than they are back in Europe, both in Britain and on the continent, they just frankly aren't issues in those countries. So you have a country that is more conservative, but I don't think you're seeing huge shifts either way and I certainly don't think you're seeing a huge shift to the left, I think you're seeing the Democratic party feel stronger, emboldened because of the failure of the war in Iraq, but I don't think that means that you're getting a country which is becoming more left-wing.

 Listen to Part 2...