... Page Two. This distance gives me license to engage in the bad form of talking about my colleagues.

Staggered by the dismal level of what passed for political discourse during the election campaign, astonished by both the role played by overseas Italian voters and the way they played it, alarmed by the evanescent contemplation of a “Grand Coalition” (whose negatives were noted in this column two weeks ago), fearing the kind of paralysis that would seriously harm Italy at this moment and intensely skeptical that the Prodi coalition has any programmatic glue whatsoever…we rushed out to buy the papers like everybody else, trying to find the Virgil who could lead us to a clearer understanding. So I know that there is no possible challenge to my assertion that no journal on either side of the water carried anything like the quality of the six analyses offered, left to right (on the page, that is) by Messrs. Zucconi, Serfaty, Caretto, Janni, LaPalombara and Pasolini Zanelli. Thanks to US Italia Weekly, one can fret at a higher level of sophistication, kvetch with balanced sobriety and develop a much better quality of ulcer.
One even finds the path we have been tracing through the Compromesso era of the 1970s more interesting in the light of today’s ague. How did we get from a time when two ideologically coherent powerhouses, with Moscow behind one and the Vatican behind the other, could engage in a more civilized discourse about the concrete possibility of serious cooperation…to today’s quandary, now seemingly drained of much of the ideology that is supposed to lead to frozen blocs, where Ambassador Janni can assert that the coalitions will not “be able to find a common ground on which to tackle Italian society’s urgent problems”?
What is striking is the vast area of common ground on policy that the Communists and Christian Democrats comfortably shared in the 1970s.
In foreign policy, there were only three relationships that mattered politically: with N.A.T.O., with the U.S., and with Moscow.
N.A.T.O. was long considered a roadblock to the Communists-in-government. But when Party Secretary Enrico Berlinguer announced (as he did several times and our forgetful press always treated it as something new) the absolutely minimalist position—that the PCI was not in favor of Italy’s withdrawing from the Alliance—it was trumpeted as such a turning that Berlinguer would be pictured on the cover of news magazines throughout the West. These timid, staged performances were enough to solve the problem for the DC Left, which had never displayed energetic enthusiasm for the military alliance.
Relations with the U.S. were more complicated but, in the end, created a real bond between the Communists and some currents of the DC. We will explore these next week because they are also wrapped up with the most important factor: a broad consensus between the two sides on the great social and economic issues.