They seem to think that the 1% speaks for all the rest of us. They don't have that high of an opinion of us and if we were in the same place as them and could only see the one percent we'd have the same opinion. You can't blame them overmuch.

they think of politicians like the Bushes, Dan Quayle etc.

Now I fear it too.

My friends in Scotland and France think that politics in America are quite perplexing and simply don’t get the crazy right wing. Both are fans of Obama. However as my friend in Paris says, "Who are we to talk...we have Sarkozy and Dominique Strauss-Kahn."

...makes our left wing look a little to the right.

I've lived in both Mexico and Poland at the time of national Presidential elections. Do they do any better discussing issues? Keep it from getting dumbed down to stupid slogans? Wake up and look at what is in their own best interests? Laugh nut-cases off the political stage? No, no, no, and no.

The 1% have discovered that advertising is all they need to bend the public (or enough of it to win an election) to their will, and so the majority of people keep voting against their own interests and electing rich cocksuckers who don't care about them (to quote George Carlin).

Democracy is dreadfully easy to hijack into the camp of the status quo. It might be different in small countries with not too many people, where you can really know what kind of person the candidate is, say like in Iceland. But in any country with a population large enough that mass media is how the politicians communicate with the public, they are what their advertising says they are.

we are crazy. Many of them live in countries with less than perfect governments, but they know their governments are bad. There is just nothing they can do about them, however, they don't get that many Americans, like the Tea Party crowd that seem to get all the press, would think that everything is fabulous. They just shake their heads in disbelief.

Sheds a little light

This is kind of the stuff that I am after!

Regularly voting against your own healthcare? What the fuck is that shit?

But, you're also well armed and prone to violence, so we tend to keep quiet.

The US has effectively three separate chambers of government.
I would put all the responsibility into the Congress. Then the Senate could oversee the legislation to keep the individual states in some sort of balance. Without the Senate three or four big states would run the whole show. So far so good.
But then there is the political "grande fromage", who can impose him or herself way beyond what any single person should be able to do. In other words I see that having a head of state with political power creates way more problems than it solves.

It really helps ~

Partly because some of it affects us, especially with regard to foreign policy. I think there is a respect for President Obama, and also that many people, even Conservative voters, find the stupidity and extremism of the Bushes and Palins a bit too much, and find it quite hard to understand how these nutters get elected - not that Cameron is anything to write home about, but at least he's not nearly as insane as someone like Palin or Santorum. Also, we are aware that money plays a bit too much of a role in American politics; we are just beginning to find out how much of a role it plays in British politics!

Having said all that - in the last few years, there has been a rather unhealthy tendency for some elements on the Right to identify a bit too much with Republicans. E.g. the Daily Telegraph writers have become obsessed with hating President Obama and the Democrats; and the Tory 'grassroots' website, ConservativeHome, has started a sister website, 'ConservativeHomeUSA', which supports the Republicans. The British Tory politician Daniel Hannan organized a 'Brighton Tea Party' , though I'm happy to say that it was poorly attended. This sort of thing never used to be the case: Tories were generally simply pro-American, whoever the president was, and there was no attempt to amalgamate the British and American parties. There is a recently-founded British Christian Right organization, Christian Concern for Our Nation, which has links to the American organization, Alliance Defense Fund; and, at the extremes, it's said that there are some links between the Tea Party and the English Defense League.

They were very serious about this!

Or Russian?

My guess is that most people in other countries don't think about our politics much at all.

Europe does, anyway. The USA affects the rest of the world, so other countries naturally do pay attention.

Of you will be accused of American exceptionalism and us thinking we are the center of the world

US news is interesting to much of the rest of the world. It just is.
I'm in europe right now, and big US stories are reported here. We heard about Trayvon Martin, for example.