How lines of the culture war have been redrawn

But religious conservatives remain a minority. And there's now a danger they will overreach, political analysts say. Right out of the block, they have worked hard to prevent Sen. Arlen Specter (R) of Pennsylvania, an abortion-rights supporter, from becoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee - the gatekeeper for Supreme Court nominations.

"They've gone after Arlen Specter tooth and toenail, and there is a real danger they may overplay their hand," says John Green, an expert on religion and politics at the University of Akron. "They're certainly a very important part of the Bush coalition, but they're not the only people in that coalition, by any means. "

In fact, Professor Green adds, Bush likely wants Specter as committee chair. The president worked hard for Specter's reelection, which he barely won, and now Specter owes him.

Still, after an issue-rich election, focused on Iraq, jobs, and terrorism, the "values vote" is getting the lion's share of attention. In part, that's because a Supreme Court vacancy may be imminent. Media attention to "moral values" - the top answer, at 22 percent, in exit polls for most important election issue - has subsumed all the other big concerns, though they scored nearly as high. (And of course, some Kerry voters cited "moral values" as their top issue, which likely means the term signifies different things to different people.)

But Gary Bauer, head of the group American Values, argues that, in fact, Bush's winning majority can be defined as a culturally conservative governing coalition, with religious conservatives playing an important part.

"It includes people who listen to Jim Dobson and Focus on the Family, and it includes the guy sitting in his living room with his Budweiser who is just darned tired of seeing his middle American values trashed by the cultural elites," says Mr. Bauer, who ran for the Republican nomination in 2000.

In other words, you didn't have to be religious to be offended by Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl last January. You also didn't need to be a Republican, or a cultural conservative, for that matter.

The sense of threat to American values had already been exacerbated by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And in 2003, when Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage, followed soon by gay wedding ceremonies in other states (most of them Democratic-leaning), the world that Americans knew changed again.

For a lot of people, especially after 9/11, the Massachusetts ruling represented "too much destabilization to their traditional moorings," says Felicia Kornbluh, a historian at Duke University. She looks back to the period right after World War II, a time of great uncertainty as the cold war was starting. "We do know that one of the ways Americans responded to that was intense emphasis on the family."

By last spring, there were signs that cultural issues - God, guns, abortion, and gay rights - could tilt the election to Bush.

In a May survey, Republican pollsters Whit Ayres and Jon McHenry found that attitudes in swing states looked more like those in Republican states than in Democratic states. For example, in Republican states and swing states, voters opposed civil unions for gay couples by double-digit margins, while voters in Democratic states supported civil unions overwhelmingly.

"Ohio is not California," says Mr. McHenry. He and Mr. Ayres noted in a column in June that all these cultural issues created a "mosaic" that allows voters to determine whether a candidate looks at the world as they do.

All the attention to the role of "culture" in the outcome of the Nov. 2 vote may also refer to differing public perceptions of the candidates themselves. Senator Kerry's cultural persona - an elite, reserved Bostonian who windsurfs - felt alien to many people in middle America, and could have hurt him at the polls more than any of his issue positions. Bush's simple, blunt rhetoric, delivered with a Texas twang and religious references, belied his own elite background.

In the end, the president beat Kerry on "leadership" by a wide margin. At a time of post-9/11 uncertainty, that may have been the most important election message of all.

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