It is also fairly common for Swiss people to watch foreign news and TV shows on the Internet, and CNN comes for free with satellite and cable TV.

Polls in Switzerland shortly before the 2008 US election have shown that roughly 97% of the Swiss population would have voted for Obama, had we been given the choice (and this is in a country where the biggest political party is conservative, and nearly everyone is white).

While this number has gone back considerably after the election (we’re still waiting for that withdrawal from Iraq, and we’re not very happy with what’s going on in Afghanistan either…), we do get upset when we see the teabaggers’ weird claims, or when we see someone best described as a Nazi sympathizer (such as Glenn Beck) assert that Obama is a Nazi.

I doubt the decision was political (Switzerland is too proud of its (alleged) neutrality); certainly it was not about Obama talking bad about the US (we KNOW that no country, including our own, is perfect, and the nature of the Swiss political system (direct democracy) makes sure that both good and bad sides of anything are openly discussed — we don’t have the impression that Obama has been running around the world saying America sucks, and we tend to like him for telling the truth when he does mention something could be improved).

If anything political did contribute, it is that quite a few Swiss don’t trust that the US has already fully recovered from being run by someone who believes in starting wars of aggression, telling lies about his opponents to the world, and torturing those he merely suspects of any wrongdoing — Rush, go blame yourself.