On Sunday, I read an interview in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica with the governor of Puglia, a region in the South of Italy. His name is Nichi Vendola, and recently won elections on a landslide running as an anti-establishment guy. Vendola is brilliant, articulated, and he is a promise for the Italian center-left politics. Certainly, one of the very few new faces of Italian politics. And he is relatively young, compared to certain mummies that have been populating Italian politics. In the interview, Vendola portraited himself as the anti-establishment guy and as an outsider. Someone who can shake up and transform the fossilized political culture of Italy. And God knows how much Italy needs such a transformation!

Because of how he represents himself, someone in Italy calls Vendola the "white Obama." The first African-American president became something of a totem for Italian politicians on the left. During the Democrat convention in Denver, I had the opportunity to chat in the lobby of a hotel with Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome, while he was waiting to take a photo-op with former president Bill Clinton. If Obama was going to win the elections, Veltroni told me, the political landscape in Italy would profoundly change  and a real chance for the center-left to win elections would be presented. It sounded like the destiny of Italy, not just of America, depended on Obama's victory. At the time, Veltroni certainly did not imagine  Obama declaring in an interview that Italians are lucky to have Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister!