Nov. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Four months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Karl Rove used a rare public speech to disclose his re-election strategy for George W. Bush: hammering home the theme that the president would make the country safer.

Privately, Rove was engineering a different plan: cultivating church leaders who could help lure back to the voting booths the 4 million evangelical Christians who Rove believed had ditched Bush in 2000 because he had a drunk-driving record.

``He wasn't going to let that happen again,'' says Scott Reed, who was Bob Dole's presidential campaign manager in 1996. ``Rove had an aggressive plan that started four years ago to work with church leadership to organize and speak positively about the Bush agenda. He recognized that social conservatives were the key to the kingdom.''

Four years after Bush became the first person since 1888 to win the presidency while losing the popular vote, Rove -- his chief political strategist and a man the president yesterday called the ``architect'' of his campaign -- secured a second victory. And he did it largely by turning out Christian voters.

The 53-year-old political mastermind, who never graduated from college, helped Bush defeat four-term Massachusetts Senator John Kerry by shifting America's attention away from the 821,000 jobs lost in Bush's first term, the rise in oil prices to a record $55.17 a barrel on Oct. 22, and the decline in leading economic indicators for the fourth-straight month in September.

`Moral Values' Rule

Bush, 58, received at least 274 electoral votes, four more than needed for victory. He also won the popular vote, 51 percent to 48 percent, receiving 3.5 million more votes than Kerry.

Exit polls of 13,531 voters nationwide showed that 22 percent cited ``moral values'' as their top issue in the election, according to CNN. That trumped the 20 percent who cited the economy, the 19 percent who chose terrorism and 15 percent who selected the Iraq war. And 79 percent of those citing moral values voted for Bush, the exit polls showed.

``There's a new cultural dividing line and it's becoming Republican,'' says Vin Weber, Midwest chairman of the Bush campaign. ``It started in the South and it's moving north. It's happening in small towns, rural areas. These are lifestyle issues, not economic issues.''

``The old dividing line used to be income,'' says Weber, a congressman from Minnesota from 1981-1993. It's now cultural differences: family values, patriotism, church attendance, gun ownership, national security, even being able to use snowmobiles on federal lands, which environmentalists oppose, he says.

`Elitist' Liberal

Rove also banked on voters having differences with Kerry, especially the nation's 30 million evangelical Christians, who were the focus of his speech in January 2002 to a Republican National Committee meeting in Austin, Texas.

``These are middle class, blue-collar states,'' he said in an interview on Sept. 27, previewing the strategy for the final month of the campaign. ``It's hard for him to make a connection to people in those states on a one-to-one basis,'' Rove said of Kerry. ``In addition to being extremely liberal from Massachusetts, he's sort of, you know, condescending, elitist.''

Richard Land, president of the Nashville, Tennessee-based Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and other religious leaders say they have preached the importance of voting based on moral issues.

``I told my congregation that I'd rather have a president who protects unborn babies than cuts my taxes 50 percent,'' Land says.

Christians Know Bush

At the same time, church organizations worked to mobilize voters. In Ohio, members of the Christian Coalition distributed more than 5 million voter guides in at least 5,000 churches in two weekends before the election opposing gay marriage and activist judges.

``Christians know the president much more than they did four years ago,'' says Roberta Combs, president of the Christian Coalition, a Washington-based group that claims to be the U.S.'s largest Christian grassroots organization, with more than 2 million supporters. ``He proved he was a man of faith.''

The importance of moral values was underscored in Ohio on Tuesday, when the state expanded its law banning gay marriage with a broader constitutional amendment against civil unions. Bush led Kerry 51.1 percent to 48.4 percent in the state, with 99 percent of the precincts reporting.

Bush has also courted the Catholic vote. That included getting an audience with Pope John Paul II in Rome in June and incorporating a picture on his campaign Web site with a headline ``Catholics for Bush.''

`Clear Choice'

The U.S. has 63 million Catholics. Those who say they attend church each week voted 53 percent to 45 percent for Bush, exit polls showed.

In the final days of the campaign in battleground states, Bush hammered away at the moral convictions that he suggested separated him from Kerry. He rallied against everything from gay marriages to partial-birth abortion to activist federal judges, as he stressed his intention to preserve marriage as an institution between man and woman.

A ``clear choice in this election is on the values that are crucial for families,'' Bush said at a rally in Wilmington, Ohio, on Nov. 1. ``There is a mainstream in American politics,'' Bush said, and Kerry ``sits on the far left bank.''

That was the message that Rove wanted driven home to voters.

Rove, born in Denver on Christmas Day 1950, is the son of an oil company geologist. His relationship with Bush goes back decades.

`Bush's Brain'

While attending the University of Utah in the early 1970s he met Lee Atwater, the South Carolinian who eventually became the chief political adviser to Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, and helped him become the 41st president.

Rove admired Atwater's take-no-prisoners attitude toward politics, according to a 2003 best-selling book by James Moore and Wayne Slater, ``Bush's Brain.''

Rove rose rapidly in the College Republicans, with Atwater's help. He and a colleague, Bernie Robinson, traveled the country, ``instructing his young audiences on dirty tricks -- pranks,'' at seminars, according to the book.

Rove landed a position as an aide to the senior Bush, who was head of the Republican National Committee from 1973-1975, and in the late 1970s he moved to Texas. Rove got to know the younger Bush from working with his father during the 1980 presidential campaign. Rove ran George W. Bush's 1994 campaign for Texas governor, where he upset Democratic incumbent Ann Richards, and has stuck with him since.

`Formidable' Coalition

A key in this year's election model, which Rove developed with campaign director Ken Mehlman, were 1.2 million volunteers. The volunteers were recruited last year, tested to ensure that they were committed, and assigned to knock on doors or work telephone banks in swing states such as Ohio and Florida.

To stir up support in battleground states, Rove sought to rally evangelicals, who he says kept the margins close four years ago by not voting.

He had Bush emphasize issues such as a constitutional ban on gay marriage as well as his $1.7 trillion in tax cuts and leadership in the war against terrorism, to galvanize Republican voters in these states.

``Bush maintained the very formidable religious coalition and then added a little bit to it in key states,'' including Ohio and Florida, says Steve Waldman, who covers religion and politics for Beliefnet.com. ``Values and religion both played a huge role in Bush's victory.''

Bush says he became a born-again Christian after a bout with alcohol, and that was key to connecting with the 25 percent of Ohioans who regard themselves as evangelicals, Waldman says. Bush tried to win over those voters in that state as well as in Florida and Iowa, which claim about the same percentage of evangelical voters.

``Evangelical and religious Christians gave him a huge base from which to start -- he only had to branch out a little bit,'' says Waldman, a former political reporter for U.S. News & World Report magazine.

``His faith is part of why he's viewed as a strong wartime leader.''

To contact the reporters on this story: Holly Rosenkrantz in Washington at hrosenkrantz@Bloomberg.net Roger Runningen in Washington at rrunningen@Bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 4, 2004 00:02 EST