Thread: It’s 8 p.m., American TV viewers, so you know it’s time for: Who Wants to Be a Secret

It’s 8 p.m., American TV viewers, so you know it’s time for: Who Wants to Be a Secretary of Commerce?
Twenty eager contenders arrived last month in Coral Gables, Fla., at an exclusive chateau with a defaulted mortgage, ready to compete for the dream job of a lifetime. At the end of each episode, their host, Joe Biden, distributes the coveted Roses of Change, inviting all but one contestant to continue on for another week.
And now, only five remain. They have come from around the nation. People like you and me, only more interested in promoting market compliance.

People like Caroline Kennedy, a mom from Manhattan hoping to find a career that will combine her desire to perform public service at the highest levels with her yen for total anonymity.

Kennedy became the favorite after last week’s show, when she was the only contestant who knew that the pact under which the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security regulates the export of solar cells is known as the Wassenaar Arrangement.

Senator John Kerry, who answered “The Peace of Westphalia,” was sent home. Vice President Biden, who has broken into tears each time he is forced to withhold a rose from a hopeful contestant, sobbed uncontrollably as Kerry recalled how, when he was a child, his grandfather had told him that if he worked hard, one day he might grow up to enforce patent law for the entire nation......

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/op...html?th&emc=th