How Did Dems Inherit Ozzie & Harriet Mantle?

The enthusiastic evangelical reaction to a working mother with an unwed pregnant teenage daughter on the GOP ticket highlights the dramatically changing face of conservative Christian America and could spell trouble for the Dems, Hanna Rosin writes in Slate. Evangelicals now actually score worse than the rest of America on the traditional values that preachers and conservative pundits laud, with families often failing to resemble the "oh-so-perfect" Obamas.

The Palin clan's flaws may boost the candidate's  working-class Christian cred, Rosin argues, pointing to figures that show the divorce rate has sunk among the college-educated and soared among evangelicals. "Since the '70s, evangelicals and the coastal elites have effectively switched places," Rosin concludes. "An intact happy marriage that produces well-behaved children, it turns out, is becoming a luxury of the elites—bad news for the Obamas." (More evangelicals stories.)