At my time, conversation hinging on America usually was about the wars or Bush/Gore and 9/11 so campaign finance came up a bit but not too much. Of curse, that impression is inaccurate, fed by our own populace and media. There is very little money involved in politics as an industry compared to its share of focus and attention. If the candidates spend a billion for POTUS it represent only a fraction of the roughly 50-60,000 billion dollars of GDP generated in that same four year period. It is considerably less than the annual revenues of the Fox News Channel or CNN. Political contributions barely make up a couple percent of annual charitable contributions, which are in the hundreds of billions, compared to the 4-5 billion spent on mid term and presidential elections in the US, and in terms of breakdown election cycles cost about $10-20 a citizen, with POTUS runing maybe $5 each every five years, the equivalent to half an hour's pay at low brackets. Much of it comes from the politicians themselves, who tend to get bitter if they get out fundraised and spend a lot of time at fundraisers... even though many of those fundraisers aren't for them or even a political cause, and many of their own events are really just adding a fundrasing component onto a speaking engagement. If your governor (or a celeb) is gonna be somewhere talking, you might as well raise some cash off it.

Fundraisers themselves are often misleading, the one I helped organize last night was really just an excuse to show off our local slate of candidates and raise some cash for a pair of modest scholarships we endowed last year. Our overhead was not much lower than our ticket sales and the scholarship money was on the side as part of a pair of raffles. The real purpose was simply to give the candidates a chance to speak to the people who'd be donating large sums or time to them later this year, and to give all the local republicans a chance to renew friendships and meet the new people. Really about the only thing 'for sale' in US politics are ambassadorial positions to 'bundlers' and frankly 'throws good parties, can raise a lot of money, is very loyal to the incumbent and knows politics' is pretty much the ideal resume for the modern ambassador anyway, that's basically the job.

I don't really blame people for holding the general opinion about cash in politics, here or overseas, but it's not really very accurate, anymore than 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name or all accountants cooking their books. That's why those of us on the right always complain about the Unions in politics and the media bias, unions make a ready-made volunteer force that anyone in their leadership can essentially preach to as a captive audience and a single positive spin 2 minute news piece on a candidate is worth way more than 2 minutes of commercials, a single blockbuster movie that portrays the right in a bad light can do more damage than a hundred million dollars worth of advertising. And on polarization, well a two party system does tend to end up that way but a lot of it is the 24-hour news cycle and even predating that the media in general... conflict makes good headlines. As a kid watching C-span I could see two congressmen sit down with the moderator and spend an hour discussing the ins and outs of a new bill with pleasant and friendly attitudes to each other and then see them that night on CNN and Fox doing a two minute heated argument instead. I'm not really sure how polarized we are though, the Brits are the only parliament I've really seen in action due to language barrier but they certainly aren't a nice and polite bunch to each other, I've no idea if that applies to any other legislatures in Europe but the US congress is apparently legendary for sedate performances on the floor. We're not really all that polarized, we don't have many riots and considering how heavily armed the populace is things stay prety peaceful.



I really have no idea what the norm is for Europe as a whole, if there even is one, most of my experience is from living in a medium-sized city that had a large college and a US base there, or occasional chats while roaming around on long weekends and staying at hostels. When I did end up having conversations with older Germans for instance, they didn't seem to care about US politics at all, and were quite happy to make small talk about interesting local sights to see and history... probably why I started altering my travel to be 'jump off train at random small stops, flip coin on next destination' instead of hitting the major tourist traps.