as Business Week, Fortune, Forbes, Money, and the Economist. He was a guest on PBS's Charlie Rose Show (twice) and on Lou Dobbs Moneyline (at least four times). And on each anniversary of the Telecom Act's passage, Armstrong was guest speaker at the Washington Press Club's Newsmaker Lun- cheon. (This SO dismayed the Bell companies that the fourth time out they dispatched the head of their trade association to deliver a counter- point speech immediately following Armstrong's.) We mailed copies of Armstrong's speeches to our allies and to anyone who could con- ceivably influence public policy. One even formed the basis for an op- ed in the Wall Street Journal. Armstrong was remarkably effective for two reasons. First, he is a compelling public speaker. But more importantly, he knows how to boil a message down to its essentials. While others tried to explain the arcane mechanics of the access charges that local telephone compa- nies impose on long-distance carriers for originating and terminating calls, Armstrong simply declared them a tax and called for their reduc- tion. The Bells' Tauzin-Dingell bill was cleverly written as a "free the Internet" act, and, in fact, few public officials really understood its implications. But they did know what monopolies were, and Arm- strong dubbed the bill an effort to "re-monopolize long distance." Efforts to rewrite the Telecom Act ultimately failed, although the Bell companies came alarmingly close when the House of Representa- tives passed the Tauzin-Dingell bill in 2002. It ultimately died in the Senate when Fritz Hollings, as good a friend of AT&T's as he was an Don't Confuse Politics and Public Relations 175 ardent opponent of the Bells, declared it "blasphemous." More impor- tantly, Voices for Choices had taken root in the states, attracting the support of local groups that were increasingly dissatisfied with the local Bell companies for letting service standards slip as they merged with each other. The state public service commissions, which had the authority to determi