'Moral values' has many interpretations

See PEW, Extra 2PEW: Which values?FROM Extra 1 Even as Americans were telling pollsters last week that they are feeling confident in the presidential election - in particular, that they are relieved not to have another vote-counting fiasco like 2000 - there is evidence that hurt remains.

It's not simply that 48 percent of the electorate is sore that John Kerry didn't win, but many of them are particularly resentful of the implication that they are somehow "immoral."

One reason for that is the kind of shorthand way we in the mass media have to deal with election analysis. You've all read by now that 21 percent of voters said "moral values" was the single most important issue in casting their ballot, and that 80 percent of them voted for President Bush. The analysis continued by insisting that those voters, or those assumed to be them, were the deciding factor in the election.

That somehow was translated into a presumed "moral mandate" that is being touted far more strongly than at any time since the heyday of the Moral Majority in the early 1980s.

So, if you didn't vote for Bush, the illogic goes, you must have voted against "moral values."

In the last 12 days, thankfully, that presumption has been challenged by: A) more thorough analysis of exit polling, and B) common sense.

Candidates' moral

views nothing new

It doesn't help, of course, that in the days after the election so many mostly blue-state-based pundits expressed surprise and shock that so many people care about "moral values." Who'da thought it?

Of course, anyone who's read a newspaper or newsmagazine, or listened to broadcast news, might have noticed that almost every presidential election of the last 30 years has been significantly influenced by voters' reaction to the "moral values" of the candidates.

Jimmy Carter's personal piety attracted voters who helped him into office in 1976. The Moral Majority and Christian Coalition were factors in the landslide elections of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. While some never forgave him for the Monica Lewinsky affair, many voters were drawn to Bill Clinton's easy expression of the religious underpinnings of his policy positions. George W. Bush may be the candidate and president most comfortable talking about his personal religious beliefs and "moral values."

And make no mistake about it, while the president did increase the percentage of Jews and Muslims who voted for him this time, it was an overwhelmingly Christian population that voted for him, whether attracted by his "moral values" or something else.

What's included

in moral values?

Clearly, however, it is a mistake - in fact, it's downright immoral - to contend that those who didn't vote for the president are somehow lacking moral values.

In a postelection poll on Americans' top priority for the president's second term, 27 percent said Iraq. Next were terrorism, the economy and health care.

While that poll didn't allow respondents the frustratingly amorphous option of "moral values," its results certainly did reflect them. Republicans and Democrats may recommend widely divergent responses to those issues, but many Americans of every political stripe would see them as matters that must be addressed out of a set of moral values.

It's just that those matters are not the ones the analysts presumed people were talking about on Election Day - gay marriage, embryonic stem-cell research, abortion.

And that should offer some encouragement to those who hope to see the consideration of moral values shift or at least expand into other matters of national policy.

What would be a moral answer to combatting poverty in our country? What is our ethical responsibility to the environment? Do we have a moral obligation to provide affordable health care?