Closing the God gap
A vote for president is a very personal matter. The candidate must share your values, soften your fears, and speak to your heart. If you are a white evangelical Christian, chances are that George W. Bush has already done all of that: Recent polls show that the president is preferred by up to 80 percent of these voters. But the White House isn't taking any chances. If the president's religious base turns out in big numbers, the Bush campaign says, it will win. Simple as that.
So it's no surprise that the president continues to tend to his flock. In last week's debate, for instance, the president's best moments of clarity were about his faith: Aside from the usual talk about respect for the "culture of life" (as in pro-life), he offered a personal account of religious ritual. "My faith is . . . it's very personal. I pray for strength. I pray for wisdom. I pray for our troops in harm's way . . . . ," he said. "Prayer and religion sustain me. . . . I love the fact that people pray for me . . . . Somebody asked me one time, 'Well, how do you know?' I said, 'I just feel it.'"
He was, of course, preaching to the choir: In the last election, 62 percent of regular churchgoers voted for Bush. "The president knows how to speak in code to them," says Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg. But last election, a top Bush adviser says, some 3 million to 4 million evangelicals may have stayed at home because of the last-minute news of the president's 1976 arrest for drunken driving. Never again, say the Bushies. "The key to this election is to get them to turn out," a top White House adviser told me. "And we will do it" --even if it requires personal escorts.
Consider this: In each of the do-or-die battleground states of Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania, about one quarter of registered voters say they consider themselves evangelical or born-again Christians. And if these voters want to know why they should vote against John Kerry, the Republican National Committee directs them to a handy website-- www.kerrywrongforevangelicals.com . (The ever inclusive campaign also has one for Mormons and another for Roman Catholics.)
Speaking of Catholics, what about John Kerry and his faith? To put it mildly, the Democratic candidate is at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to religious voters. Not that Democrats aren't religious--70 percent say they are, compared with 80 percent for the GOP. It's just that the party has become secularized: Back in the days of FDR and the New Deal, the party had no God gap. But then its leaders sided with the 1962 Supreme Court decision prohibiting school prayer, and soon the GOP southern strategy wasn't just about race--it was also about religion. Yet southerner Jimmy Carter appealed to religious voters, and so did Bill Clinton--until he became the Democrats' worst personal-values nightmare, allowing Republicans to consolidate the white churchgoing base. Then along comes born-again Bush, and bingo.
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