When the dust settles on the presidential election of 2004, the most important insight should be about the political mood of the nation and not about the closeness of the race.

George W. Bush’s victory was not a fluke this time. Again it all came down to one state’s electoral votes, but this time the raw numbers didn’t tell the whole story. This turned out to be an election about gut values rather than purely partisan politics. The hordes of new voters, who were expected to favor Sen. John Kerry, surprised prognosticators by dancing to a variety of tunes. In key states, as many of them obviously chose Bush as Kerry.

President Bush put his finger on the phenomenon in a seemingly offhand remark shortly after he had voted in Crawford, Texas. He said the election was really about who voters trusted more to guide the country through the next four years.

With the country divided about evenly on the issues of war and the economy, it came down to those voters who chose deeper reasons to stick with Bush. There was reluctance to fire a president during war, which was too much like capitulating to foreign enemies and critics including Osama bin Laden, and discomfort about the threat of domestic terror. These were the president’s trump cards and they edged out miscues in Iraq and unease about the economy.

Kerry’s strong finish should set off some warning bells in Bush country, though. Once he got himself in gear, the senator scored well by highlighting Bush’s stumbles in Iraq. It bothers people that Bush refuses to take personal responsibility for them. They are dissatisfied with the situation in Iraq and want to see some dramatic changes soon.

But it also bothered a lot of people that Kerry was better at pointing out the mistakes in Iraq than he was at setting a clear agenda for dealing with terrorism or anything else. He had too many plans and pat answers and no overarching governing philosophy that resonated with the masses.

Bush, on the other hand, had a single simple theme: security in America. He could always bring it to the fore, even when he was being battered on other fronts.

The result was that Kerry could score hits repeatedly on Bush, but the president kept deflecting them by saying, “My job is keeping you safe.” That struck a note with a lot of voters wavering between discontent with Bush and doubts about Kerry.

Democrats need to recognize that their party values, which were reflected by Kerry’s campaign, are being supplanted by much more personalized sets of values. Some are social values, some ideological, religious or economic, but they do not necessarily translate directly as Democratic or Republican. The Republicans went after voters who agreed with the president’s values, regardless of how they defined themselves politically. Democrats appealed to discontent with Bush and threw in their traditional party values as a sweetener. Knee-jerk liberalism no longer wins elections.

The danger for Republicans is that knee-jerk conservatism might not win future elections. One of the GOP’s toughest jobs will be figuring out how to avoid alienating all the non-Republican voters who cast their ballots for Bush the man rather than for the Republican Party.

About half the country still thinks the other half has made a mistake, but that feeling does not mean that either party can pocket its half of the population and expect it to behave like party faithful. This election proves that politics don’t work that way anymore.