Most Americans take their system of government for granted, as if Moses himself had delivered the Constitution engraved on marble tablets. However, for outsiders, apart from the circus of primaries and the system of institutionalized bribery and corruption that passes for campaign

finance, perhaps its strangest anomaly is the Cabinet, which, unlike in a parliamentary system, contains people who may never have been elected to any public office. Like the hereditary principle, this arrangement occasionally throws up outstanding incumbents, but as generations of Windsors and Hapsburgs proved, they are the exception.

Reading Madam Secretary, one is forced to the conclusion that Madeleine Albright is no such exception to the rule. Before she joined the Clinton Cabinet, initially as US ambassador to the United Nations, Albright's highest elected office was to the board of the Beauvoir School--a private establishment catering to the first three grades, affiliated with the National Cathedral in Washington. One suspects that it was not a contested election, but it certainly was a good place for an uncertain arriviste with social and political ambitions to network with the capital's elite.

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