John McCain’s victory speech on the heels of last night’s unsurprising Wisconsin win, which had the Arizona senator asserting for the first time that “I will be our party’s nominee for President,” featured none of the traditional values talk we’ve come to expect from Republican nominees. No mention of abortion, “traditional marriage,” judges, the role of faith in public life, etc. But McCain’s general election campaign may shape up as a test of whether battling terrorism has become a true “values” issue for evangelicals and other religious voters. This is a subject on which McCain did weigh in last night:

The most important obligation of the next President is to protect Americans from the threat posed by violent extremists who despise us, our values and modernity itself. They are moral monsters, but they are also a disciplined, dedicated movement driven by an apocalyptic zeal, which celebrates murder, has access to science, technology and mass communications, and is determined to acquire and use against us weapons of mass destruction. The institutions and doctrines we relied on in the Cold War are no longer adequate to protect us in a struggle where suicide bombers might obtain the world’s most terrifying weapons.
If we are to succeed, we must rethink and rebuild the structure and mission of our military; the capabilities of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies; the purposes of our alliances; the reach and scope of our diplomacy; the capacity of all branches of government to defend us. We need to marshal all elements of American power: our military, economy, investment, trade and technology and our moral credibility to win the war against Islamic extremists and help the majority of Muslims, who believe in progress and peace, win the struggle for the soul of Islam.

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