Lost horizon: an alienated GOP hands the future to Al Gore.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia

Republicans sound different when they talk to their big donors. The party they describe isn't a party you hear from much these days. They say nothing about "culture wars" and lots about freedom. They praise entrepreneurship and free enterprise. They hardly even utter the word conservative.

And they choose their speakers accordingly. At a January conference for Team 100 - donors who give the GOP at least $100,000 every four years and make five-figure contributions in between - Jeff Eisenach, the president of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, told the audience about a survey Wired magazine had commissioned. "Digitally connected" citizens, he reported, are well educated, very affluent, white, and mostly male. They believe in free markets, go to church, and are optimistic about the future. While patriotic, they are skeptical of government's ability to solve problems.

In other words, Eisenach concluded, they should be Republicans. But they aren't. The GOP does fairly well among them, claiming about 40 percent. But about a quarter call themselves independents and fully a third are - horror of horrors! - Democrats. Charged with discussing "The High-Tech Community and the GOP Vote," he went on to dispense practical advice: Pay more attention to technology issues. Don't hide huge new taxes in telecom legislation. Spend more time schmoozing Silicon Valley.

It was an interesting talk, and something the audience needed to hear. Despite a methodology that overemphasized owning pagers and cell phones, the Wired survey did identify a real and important political subculture - informed, active, and largely up for grabs. The "connected" make up less than 10 percent of the population, but they are disproportionately influential. (And, if anything, Wired's methodology undercounted them.) From such swing voters come political realignments.

But Eisenach didn't get to the heart of the matter. He made the mistake political analysts and operatives almost always make on this subject. He confused a cultural identity with an economic interest. So he offered his audience a narrow agenda of business issues. He had nothing to say to the values that move such voters.

In a recent article in The Weekly Standard, conservative lawyer and PBS hostproducer Hugh Hewitt repeated the error, adding a layer of pejorative language. As the articulate co-host of the leading public affairs show in Southern California, Hewitt is the face of the Republican intelligentsia for a good...