After graduating from Stanford in 2001, President Clinton's daughter Chelsea went to Oxford for further study. Recently she returned to America, and left-wing cartoonist Ted Rall imagines what her job hunt must be like. Here Ms Clinton is in the office of the personnel di-rector of a major New York firm - notice the view out the panoramic window. Though she is the one looking for a job, he is busy buttering her up,①and incidentally making Rall's ironic point: "It's no surprise that, in the midst of rampant unemployment, you're fielding numerous offers."

　　In the current economic downturn, the firm has no doubt already laid off a good number of bright young peo-ple like Ms Clinton. Why, then, the eagerness to secure her for the firm? It's not her brains they're after: she doesn't even need to show up. What they crave is "access", the power to open doors and gain a hearing that the Clinton name will provide. The ,000 is being offered for Chelsea's surname and her father's Rolodex.

　　"Rolodex" is the commercial name of a common in-dex system much used by busy executives. It is a device consisting of alphabetized cards on a circular metallic frame, which can be rotated and allows for rapid checking. President Clinton's Rolodex would contain the private phone numbers of powerful figures in politics and business.

　　Will Chelsea take the job? Maybe. The personnel di-rector is astounded: at the still tender age of 23 she can turn down ,000! Chelsea's final comment is a pun: a "classless society" ordinarily means one without economic or social classes, but in her case may simply mean one without classes in school, plus a lot of money and deference.

　　Americans often envision their country as in some sense "classless". Of course, everyone knows that classes exist, but they are, successful people like to think, open; so-cial mobility is great, so anyone with energy or talent can rise from the working class to the middle or upper middle class or beyond. Ted Rall disagrees: for some people, he tells us, getting ahead is vastly easier than for others.