“I remember when I got on Energy and Commerce, everybody jumped for the Telecommunications Subcommittee first,” Peter Kostmayer, a former Democratic representative from Pennsylvania, said as quoted by veteran political journalist Martin Schram. “There was a member sitting next to me, and every time another member bid for that committee, he went ‘Ding!’—as if a cash register was going off.”[6.56] When politicians talked about the need for election reform and clean, ethical government, many were themselves superb examples of the need for action. Maybe, I’d thought earlier, I could at least enjoy an open-minded hearing from a nonmillionaire on the Advisory Council. Bonnie Bracey was the only elementary school teacher. She should have loved TeleRead. But during an official virtual conference organized on the Net by the Commerce Department, she went after not Opperman but _me_. “I am not the least interested in the TeleReader,” she said in a public message, “and I don’t have any money after trying to do this job to invest anyway.” I was and am a writer. Last I knew, I had not been selling computers. Bracey needed to scrutinize my proposal. Maybe she could then dismiss it as a nefarious writer’s plot. TeleRead did, after all, propose a massive shifting of resources from bureaucracy to various forms of knowledge, including—_gasp!_—electronic _books_. At times, Bracey would e-mail me that my proposal intrigued her, but somehow she would never get around to _study_ it, or at least to telling me that she had gone beyond summaries. She would repeat the usual clichés that citizens didn’t want to spend money on schools. Toward TeleRead’s cost-justification mechanisms, toward the support that it could win among frugal, business-oriented conservatives such as William Buckley, she was unresponsive. Granted, she wasn’t callous about the children TeleRead could help. At the personal level she had been exemplary, spending hundreds and perhaps thousands of dollars on hardware and software that she could use in her classes. But TeleRead for her could have been a bother. Offensively, perhaps, it meant a national library online for all, regardless of whether they happened to be students anywhere.