Replying on February 22, 1995, to questions from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Opperman’s company noted that all donations were legal and on record at the Federal Election Commission. “It appears that you believe the laws regarding these matters should be changed,” West said. “If so, the proper thing for you to do is to seek to change these laws rather than criticize those who carefully comply with existing law.” The company denied any efforts to influence officials improperly. West said that its employees, its political-action committee, and its counsel all had “long histories of being active in the political process. It is inaccurate to tie their donations over the past 20 years to any specific issue of legislation pending before a government body. Your inference that such donations have been made as one collective effort is also totally untrue.”[[6.53]]

West pointed out to the Star Tribune that people from rival information companies were also making contributions. But of course! Money always counted in politics. Vance Opperman had put it well several years ago as head of Opperman Heins & Paquin, a leading law firm notable for PAC gifts to Minneapolis politicians. “If we have those who oppose the interests of our clients,” he said, “we do not support them.” He said the law firm’s PAC ran under this philosophy: “Support your friends. Punish your enemies.”[[6.54]]

Presumably Bill Clinton and Al Gore would rather avoid punishment from the Oppermans of this nation. While almost ignoring librarians and educators, the Administration had appointed to its Advisory Council some members of the elite who were already over-represented in the political process. Did Vance Opperman, as a friend of Gore’s, really have to worry about the Vice President reading his letters? I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had Gore’s private e-mail address. Just how many electronic entreaties to the Hill, or to the Clinton-Gore area on the Web, would it take to neutralize the little fortune donated by friends of West Publishing? I couldn’t have agreed more with Cliff Stoll when he wrote that Washington often ignored citizens’ e-mail. It all figured. The Power People were too busy raising donations from millionaires and political-action committees—hardly the biggest champions of low-cost knowledge.

Granted, some optimists hoped that the Internet itself could help turn around Washington. Aided by the Net, a group in Washington State had gathered $26,000 to help defeat Tom Foley, then the Democratic Speaker of the House. And NewtWatch, an anti-Gingrich effort on the World Wide Web, had registered as a political-action committee. Some members of both major parties were hoping to use the Net to raise money efficiently from small donors.[[6.55]]

That was far from a full answer, though. Even before I learned of all the campaign cash from some members of the Advisory Council, I had wondered about the group’s odd composition. Not everyone on the council was rich, of course, far from it. But why had business prevailed so brazenly over the general public and Al Gore’s little neighbor back in Tennessee, the one who was supposed to dial up books from the Library of Congress regardless of family income? Just one teacher and one librarian? In politer language I’d sent the question on to a White House staffer, and he had patiently explained to me that Washington had to serve the needs of the “stakeholders.”

I loved the word. It sounded so innocent, so natural, so philosophical. What if this were eighteenth-century France, the revolution were on, and Marie Antoinette looked like guillotine fodder? Armed with such a marvelous locution, she could forego all references to bread and cake and simply say, “Stop! I’m one of the stakeholders.”

Now having documented a nice flow of money from “stakeholders” to politicians, especially Democrats, I remembered how many Watergate-era ambassadorships had gone to the highest bidders. Wasn’t the same ethos at work here as Richard Nixon’s? I knew of no broken laws—but perhaps that was the trouble.

“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.