Terrorism, Moral Values, Turnout Seen As Key To Bush Win
Moral values and terrorism were the top issues cited by voters in exit polls. The New York Times reports Bush strategist Karl Rove's "relentless focus on turning out more Republican voters, many of them evangelical Christians, was the critical factor in Mr. Bush's victory, Republicans said." Other factors, Republicans said, "were Mr. Bush's gamble to run on terrorism and his repeated use of a clear, concise message." USA Today reports, "In the end, terrorism trumped everything. The first presidential election after the Sept. 11 attacks was defined and ultimately decided by voters' fear of another attack." Exit polls "found that President Bush won the support of 85% of those who said terrorism was the campaign's top issue."
American Evangelicals Compared To Islamic Jihadists.
In a New York Times op-ed, Garry Wills of Northwestern University says, "The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies. Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed."
