All the hype about the Information Superhighway notwithstanding, most of the Feds didn’t feel quite as at home on computer networks as billed. Most Congress members in mid-1995 still lacked public e-mail addresses. Meanwhile, the Net was catching on among millions of younger Americans who surfed freely, while their elders could barely master commercial networks such as CompuServe. By way of Clipper and blatantly anti-network copyright proposals, the White House was kissing off all too many within Generation Net.[6.24] A further embarrassment was the contrasting enlightenment of some Republican conservatives, who many Democrats on the Net might have dismissed entirely in the past. Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing talk show host, didn’t just show up on CompuServe as a visitor. He personally logged on again and again and even met his wife there. He might not be on the Net itself, but he was much more at ease with the technology than were the majority of the liberals on the Hill. Meanwhile, the most powerful conservative of all, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, spoke out against the Exon amendment. William Buckley, the noted conservative journalist, was a major backer of my proposal for a decentralized national library system online. And the conservative writer George Gilder, while all too zealous at times about free markets, had made some of the most prescient predictions on the direction in which the technology was headed. Too many Democrats were TV-centric, while Gilder believed that computers would be the new entertainment medium, prevailing over television. Sales figures proved him right. More Americans bought desktops computers in 1994 than purchased color televisions, and it was only a matter of time until they logged onto computer networks and worried about their privacy there. And here were Clinton and Gore pushing Clipper with more ardor than they could summon up for well-stocked electronic libraries for all. Of course, not everybody on the Democratic side was hopeless, and many Republican law-and-order types loved Clipper, the Bush leftover. Also, these same politicians might well applaud the Clinton Administration’s anti-Net copyright proposals, not understanding all the undertows that could ultimately drag property rights under. But at least they hadn’t enlisted civil libertarians and populists in their campaigns to the extent that Bill Clinton had. I’d never have voted for the man if I’d known in advance about Clipper, the harassment of Zimmermann, and the antediluvian copyright policies. Bush in some ways might have been preferable. Not knowing the difference between a potato chip and a silicon chip, he would have done much less damage. A smarter, more principled Democrat than Clinton could pick up the pieces in ’96.