COMMENTARY: Beginning Second Term, Bush Defends Values From the Crimson Center

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) As President Bush takes the podium next Thursday (Jan. 20) to deliver his second inaugural address, the chattering classes will be listening for a conciliatory tone, muted religious references and signs that he is willing to “govern from the center.” Though Bush is the first presidential candidate to exceed […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) As President Bush takes the podium next Thursday (Jan. 20) to deliver his second inaugural address, the chattering classes will be listening for a conciliatory tone, muted religious references and signs that he is willing to “govern from the center.”

Though Bush is the first presidential candidate to exceed 50 percent of the popular vote in 16 years, and some 59 million Americans chose to re-elect him on Nov. 2, the conventional wisdom that has emerged among many elites is that Bush must ignore this mandate and the religious and conservative impulses of the American electorate that made it possible. To be successful in his next term, they advise, Bush should jettison his red-state values and move toward the “center” of American politics.


In fact, Bush stands much closer to the center than blue-state pundits or their Democratic representatives. While the secularized, increasingly radicalized Democratic Party has failed to connect with the religious and moral impulses of American voters in three successive national elections, Bush’s moral conservatism has earned him substantial political capital once again. Now he must spend it defending the moral values that American voters named as their top concern on Election Day.

“Values voters” overwhelmingly supported Bush last fall because they consider him a man of moral courage and sincere faith. They trust him as a leader whose priorities mirror their own _ a president willing to defend marriage, the sanctity of life, religious liberty and the power of the people against judicial activism. In the religious rhetoric that his opponents criticize, these voters hear echoes of the basic principles of faith and freedom that guided America’s founding fathers, principles too often ignored in public discourse today.

The values voters are not alone: They belong to a broad swath of Americans who came out in force last fall to re-elect the president. Though some pundits still cling to the notion that these red-state voters are theocratic fundamentalists on the fringes of American public life, the broad crimson stain of the electoral map suggests otherwise. America is not an even mix of red and blue. It is a nation of red with blue fringes.

But the voters who colored America red are not content simply to see their man back in the Oval Office. They want to see results. The broad mandate that buoyed Bush also encouraged the values voters who elected him, and they expect major progress on judicial appointments, pro-life legislation and a federal marriage amendment in his second term.

As evangelical author and White House adviser David Barton recently told U.S. News & World Report, “This kind of hope was present after the 2000 election. But it’s grown from hope to confidence that something will change. It’s the strongest emotion of expectation I’ve seen in decades.”

With great expectation comes the possibility of great disappointment, as religious conservatives know well. If President Bush fails to keep his campaign promises on social issues, the damage to his credibility and his party’s future could be serious and lasting.

In the days leading up to his inauguration, and the first few months of his second term, President Bush will surely hear many more warnings about the “dangers” of serving the interests of the values voters who sealed his victory and about the importance of staking out “centrist” positions on moral questions. He will be urged not to spend his political capital on hot-button social issues like abortion and gay marriage, and to tone down his religious rhetoric lest even his most modest references to God and moral absolutes offend the relativists and secularists in his midst.


Facing this familiar chorus, President Bush should do what he does best: Stay the course, speak boldly and act decisively. He should move full-steam ahead in fulfilling his campaign promises to protect the lives of the unborn and the aged, defend traditional marriage and give Americans judges that will strictly interpret the law instead of legislating from the bench. He should continue to defend the role of religion in the public square. And he should keep a copy of the electoral map handy to remind himself that he must govern from the center _ which is crimson red.

(Colleen Carroll Campbell, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., is a former speechwriter to President George W. Bush and author of “The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy” (Loyola Press, 2002).)

MO/JL END RNS

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