Weber: The Republican Party, I would argue, since Goldwater has not been nearly as much the party of big business as the Democrats would like them to believe. Furthermore, to the extent that the Republicans have been the party of big business, it has not been helpful to them politically.

The new Republican Party that came to power in 1994 is a party of small business, of white collar workers. It's a party that probably is also defined some ways, not necessarily by people's occupations. It's the party of intact families. It's the party of religious people, people who go to church every Sunday. That's a better way of identifying who the Republican constituencies are. [They're] small business owners, intact families, church going people, you can probably add another half a dozen constituencies.

It's not really the party of Wall Street and corporate America. There certainly is not the antipathy to wealth in the Republican Party that there still is in the Democratic Party, but there's also no sense that they have it all right in the corporate board rooms in the Republican Party anymore.

Big business can accommodate itself to big government far better than small business can. Even when small businesses get to be pretty big, their partnership with big government was always something that frustrated the Republican Party.

In some ways the Republicans, when they were clearly identified as the party of big business in 1980s, early 90s, had the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, you've got the popular rap for being a party of large corporations. On the other hand, if you looked at how the political action committees that those corporations formed directed their political contributions, a majority of them went to the Democrats because they were basically interested in accommodating themselves to the federal government. I don't like the phrase 'buying influence' because I don't think that these are bad people, and I don't think there's nearly the degree of corruption that the popular mythology would have you believe. But I do think that big business has the resources and the desire to accommodate itself to government and work out a deal, if you will, with big government. And part of that was substantial political contributions to Democratic members of Congress and Democratic candidates.

So the Republicans sort of lost on both sides. They've got the negative attachment of big business but they didn't get the positive of having the resources flow in to their campaign.

Q: The commerce department. Big business loves the Commerce Department. It's like Japan. The government's always helping big business with export. The Newt Gingrich revolution wants to get rid of the Commerce Department.

Weber: I think that is an important issue because it has to do with our vision of the future. If you have a positive vision of the future as Republican, it has to involve a very vigorous entrepreneurial economy where the private sector is a lot of the good news. That's only true if you have a lot of innovation, a lot of competition and a lot of economic growth.

There certainly is every reason to believe that that has diminished, in at least the Republican's model, certainly, diminished to the extent that the government starts picking winners and losers and subsidizing large mature businesses that have had their main growth in the past. So, it's not just abolishing the Department of Commerce, it's making a strong statement that says, 'We don't wish any harm, any ill to big business.' Unlike big Democrats who may have, at least rhetorically, said that big business is a threat to the country.

On the other hand, we don't believe that the best things in America's future are going to come as a result of businesses that exist today. They're going to come as a result of new businesses that are going to be formed tomorrow and the next day after that.

Our policies are going to be tilted to the extent that they are tilted at all. One of the things that Republicans are going to be pursing in the next year or so is leveling the playing field as much as they can so it doesn't tilt in any direction.

But if we're going to tilt in one direction, it ought to be to an entrepreneurship, toward small enterprise, toward innovation. That means not toward big business.