So far Washington had not worked nearly as hard as it should to drive down the cost of knowledge for the average American. At the same time a network-hostile copyright proposal was delighting information monopolists and imperiling the ability of citizens to share electronic newspaper clips in even a limited way. I testified at an official hearing on the NII in 1993, and what most struck me about Clinton-Gore was the chasm between words and deeds—the same mind-set that led to Oceania’s propaganda agency being named the Ministry of Truth. The gospel according to Al Gore was that people of all income levels would be able to travel the dataways. His musings later adorned the peach-colored newsprint of _The Mini Page_, a newspaper insert for children. “No longer will geographical location, wealth, gender, or any other factor limit learning,” Gore reassured elementary schoolers. He told how “a child from my home town of Carthage, Tennessee, will be able to come home from school, turn on a computer, and plug into the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.” The NII would clearly be in the grand democratic tradition, small “d.” The next day, however, the _Washington Post_ carried news of a different stripe from Bruce Lehman, the Clinton-Gore commissioner of patents and trademarks, who chaired the NII working group on intellectual property. I learned that “because of the ease of digital reproduction, Lehman does not foresee that digital libraries will put copyrighted works within easy reach online the way they do books on a library shelf. Copyrighted digital materials are likely to be available only to subscribers—libraries, for example—who pay royalty fees, he said. People who want the material might have to go to their local library and use a computer there that would not allow them to copy or redistribute the work, Lehman said.”[6.35] A few months later Bruce Lehman would graciously tell the _Wall Street Journal_ that, yes, he would tolerate children carrying home copyrighted CD-ROMs and floppies of electronic books.[6.36] Compared to networked books, however, the CDs and the rest would be pathetic. Distribution over the Internet and other networks could be the cheapest way to get the material spread around, while assuring a wide variety of material for all. When William Buckley likened CD-ROMs to 78-rpm shellac records in the era of the Internet, he couldn’t have been more precise. And yet this was the future as envisioned by Bill Clinton’s intellectual property czar. So much for the well-informed citizenry needed for a Jeffersonian America. Lehman was beating the bushes for electronic oligarchy.