Tending To The Flock; Soul Man: A White House aide keeps faith with the faithful.(Tim Goeglein, presidential aide to George W. Bush)

Byline: Melinda Henneberger

So how do social conservatives really feel about the largely moderate face of the GOP convention? Just fine, thanks. In fact, the endless talking-head debates over whether they are furious, middling mad or only slightly dismayed is one of the many reasons they have to smile on the plane home from New York. Because while moderates like Arnold and Rudy may have carried the week, the religious right has dominated for the past four years. It knows the difference between reality and a TV show--and has matured well beyond the time when it looked to a political convention for reassurance.

For that, it has Tim Goeglein, the precise and polite 40-year-old Midwesterner in charge of White House outreach to religious groups. Goeglein spends every week of the year reinforcing the message that this president is not only with them but one of them. And in Goeglein, Bush political adviser Karl Rove may have found the perfect messenger--an evangelical Lutheran from Ft. Wayne, Ind., who previously worked for Christian leader Gary Bauer and intimately knows the issues and personalities of the conservative faith community. "Tim's just flat-out the best I've ever seen at this job, and I've seen them all," says Ralph Reed, Bush adviser and former head of the Christian Coalition.

The swing voters Goeglein has to worry about are evangelicals who've historically seen politics as too dirty to get involved in and pro-life Roman Catholics alienated from a Democratic Party they may well agree with on other issues. But orthodox believers of all faiths--a group that numbers roughly 50 million--seem to identify with this president as with no other, and are energized as perhaps never before. Even the intensely earnest Goeglein was almost giddy during the convention, likening the Bush team to "Seabiscuit coming around the fourth turn." His biggest challenge heading into the fall just may be avoiding overconfidence.

Even the recent resignation of a top Bush adviser on Catholic voters seems to have caused surprisingly little disruption inside the campaign. The adviser, Deal Hudson, left his unpaid position on Aug. 18, just ahead of a story in the National Catholic Reporter detailing a former student's allegations of sexual-misconduct charges that had led Hudson to resign his tenured teaching position at Fordham University in 1995. Goeglein was all steel in responding to his friend's resignation, however, crisply citing the fact that he had received only three calls about the matter as proof that it was of no real consequence.