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"From the Klaus side people are talking about this with a lot of alarm," said Alan Levy, editor in chief of the Prague Post and author of a book on Czechoslovakia, "So Many Heroes." "He's apparently in America now to avoid meeting her face to face."

Pehe took open pleasure in noting how people were reacting to Klaus' apparent skittishness. "If the spotlight is on anyone but him, he just can't cope with that," Pehe said. "Klaus didn't want to be in the position of being reproached by a possible presidential candidate. I think he probably takes it more seriously than even his supporters know, otherwise he could have stayed here and faced her."

Klaus' low public standing -- not to mention his relative obscurity -- explains why ordinary Czechs are looking elsewhere for candidates.

Last December, a crowd of 50,000 gathered in Wenceslas Square to mark the 10th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution that delivered then-Czechoslovakia from communist rule. The crowed directed much of its ire against Klaus and Zeman.

The December protests in Prague and 20 other cities were inspired by a petition written up by six leaders of the '89 protests. "The current political representatives have brought the country into a profound moral, social, political and economic crisis, and they seriously threaten the integration of the Czech Republic into the European Union," it read.

That sort of crisis atmosphere might not be easy for Albright to ignore, given her strong ties to the country and its turbulent history. She was born Marie Jana Korbelova in Prague in 1937, and fled with her parents to England two years later to escape Hitler. Czech was her first language, her mother tongue, and even now the language remains a part of her.

"Her Czech is very good," said Pehe. "In that sense she is absolutely connected with the Czechs. You can hear a sort of accent there, but grammatically and otherwise it's perfect. It's in a way cute, the way she speaks. It makes it sound very special."

Albright underscored her passionate connection to the tradition of Czech leadership during her visit. She told students at Masaryk University in Brno on Monday, "Although President Masaryk died when I was 4 months old, in every other sense, I grew up with him. My family spoke about him. My father worked for his son. He inspired an entire generation of Czechoslovaks by his life, his beliefs and his works. There was a time people thought he should be president of the world, as it was known in the '30s. He was the philosopher president. He acted like a president. He led like a president. He even looked like a president. And he was also, in his way, a foremost feminist, taking his wife's maiden name as his middle one."

It may be easy for people in Washington to dismiss the idea of Albright giving up her social position in Washington, her access and perquisites, to run off to a small country -- one which many in Congress could not accurately locate on a map. Wednesday's Washington Post headline cracked: "Havel Has an Albright Idea," which seemed to capture the titter-into-the-hand reaction of many to Havel's suggestion.

As veteran political analyst Jackson Janes of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies put it, "It's hard for me imagine that someone who has spent her entire life in Washington, someone who is a tenured professor at Georgetown, would uproot herself like that."

But it's always easier to dismiss a bold, new idea than to give it time to develop. Madeleine Albright would probably be insane to run off to Prague to try to build democracy. But there are worse forms of insanity.
salon.com | March 8, 2000

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