The analogy between Berlusconi's political style and the Tea Party movement's mentioned in this article is not without precedents in the American press. One year ago, for instance, Newser founder and Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff emphasized the similarities between Silvio Berlusconi and Sarah Palin. In an article entitled "Does Silvio Berlusconi Explain Sarah Palin?", Wolff wrote: "For more than twenty years, in Italy, there has been, among most Italians, an attempt to explain that most inexplicable political creature, Silvio Berlusconi. He unapologetically violates all political sensibility, nuance, and sense of convention and propriety, and continues to succeed beyond the bounds that any reasonable person would have thought possible. It’s pure shamelessness, a total absence of self-consciousness, combined with entrepreneurial zeal. These are extraordinary self-reliant salesmen, Berlusconi and Palin. Id people. Media creations, it goes without saying. He was a cruise-ship crooner; she a beauty contestant. It’s about living the life. More: Their life is a fantasy of the life people would live if they were in a position to live the life. The life larger than life. In the past, show business people got to live like this, and drug dealers, and, in small towns everywhere, there’s always one outsized specimen of sui generis crassness." --The Editors

The analogy between Berlusconi's political style and the Tea Party movement's mentioned in this article is not without precedents in the American press. One year ago, for instance, Newser founder and Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff emphasized the similarities between Silvio Berlusconi and Sarah Palin. In an article entitled "Does Silvio Berlusconi Explain Sarah Palin?", Wolff wrote: "For more than twenty years, in Italy, there has been, among most Italians, an attempt to explain that most inexplicable political creature, Silvio Berlusconi. He unapologetically violates all political sensibility, nuance, and sense of convention and propriety, and continues to succeed beyond the bounds that any reasonable person would have thought possible. It’s pure shamelessness, a total absence of self-consciousness, combined with entrepreneurial zeal. These are extraordinary self-reliant salesmen, Berlusconi and Palin. Id people. Media creations, it goes without saying. He was a cruise-ship crooner; she a beauty contestant. It’s about living the life. More: Their life is a fantasy of the life people would live if they were in a position to live the life. The life larger than life. In the past, show business people got to live like this, and drug dealers, and, in small towns everywhere, there’s always one outsized specimen of sui generis crassness." --The Editors