Editor’s note: Joe Johnson is editor-in-chief of Business Reform Magazine, the leading Christian business magazine with over 100,000 readers. Each issue features practical advice on operating successfully in business while glorifying God.
The economy is sluggish. The conflict in Iraq is still on. And a record number of voters turned out yesterday to cast their ballots for reasons that had little to do with either of these.
The Kerry campaign hoped that the recession and recent problems in Iraq would pack enough punch with the electorate to give him a final push in the final few weeks. Fortunately for all of us, the optimism of Kerry–and media allies like Dan Rather– didn’t pan out.
News sources are reporting in unison that two primary issues pushed Bush over the edge in this tightly contested race: Terrorism and moral values. The first of these probably comes as very little of a surprise. The second, however, speaks volumes about what post-9/11 America seems to value.
Bush, throughout the campaign, managed to bill himself as the “moral” candidate, reinforcing the idea that he was more pro-family and more opposed to gay marriages than was Kerry. Kudos need to go to his campaign strategists. When it looked as if the hot button in this election might have been any number of things news pundits and anchors had been predicting ad nauseam in the preceding months, Bush, it seems, managed to pick the right one.
Evidence for how the country at large felt about the moral state of our country (both in it’s current and future positions), was summed up nicely in the fact that the bans on gay marriage in 11 states were all given a nod by each state’s voters. In Mississippi, in fact, the ban won by a margin of 6 to 1, and even in Oregon–where gay rights activists had been crossing their collective fingers for a win–homosexual unions got the boot.
An exit poll yesterday by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International found that 4 out of 10 voters considered either terrorism or moral values the most important issue this election.
News sites across the web this morning seemed to be scrambling to try to explain this surprise shift in voter values. The media, in fact, is treating this result as if it’s a great surprise. Such a reaction, of course, doesn’t even begin to ring true: The media has known for a long time that values matter. Across the Web and television screens alike today, the false shock in almost every report on the subject just makes it more apparent that this particular truth slipped out between their fingers. Truth, after all, is a hard thing to stop once it gets going.
More evidence for the faith this nation has in values can be found in today’s stockmarket reports. Both the Dow and the Nasdaq jumped up over a percentage point each on the news of President Bush’s reelection. The opposite, no doubt, would’ve happened if the media had had their way and Kerry had won out. Businesspeople know what values mean to business, and having in place an administration that reflects the moral fabric of this nation can only mean good things for the economy.
A lot of us, of course, already knew that the moral state of our nation is among the top considerations in any election. What is surprising, though, is that after 9/11 and the ongoing wave of corporate scandals, the rest of America just might be starting to see the light as well. The greatest irony of this election is that in a post-modern culture such as ours, where values are maligned at every turn, the election that the media had been billing for months as the “most important of our generation” turned almost solely on moral ideals. The “moral majority” hasn’t seen much press time of late, but after yesterday’s polling, it seems that the majority–at least in this election–pulled for the moral.
Read more news from a biblical worldview each day at BusinessReform.com.
Jihadism is alive and well 23 years after 9/11: Here’s why
Chuck Norris