Juno in Juneau

How does the revelation that Alaska's first daughter, seventeen-year-old Bristol Palin, is five months pregnant affect our view of her newly ennobled mother, Alaska governor and McCain VP pick Sarah Palin? The media, which in its reactionary, post-PC mode has taught itself to genuflect before any manifestation of the lives and values of the white working class, has been busy convincing itself that little Bristol's teen pregnancy contributes to the 'authenticity' of her mother's backwoods, moose-hunting image. The Palin family, say the McCain cmap and its media plants, is just working through the kind of issues and curveballs that life throws at all ordinary Americans.

Excuse my ingorance: since when is teen pregnancy a core American value, or indeed, the kind of issue that confronts 'all american families'? It may be the kind of issue that confronts ordinary families in Iran, but teen pregnancy rates in the United States are pretty near the all-time lows achieved during the Clinton administration.

Rates inched upwards, of course, during the Bush years and the imposition of Abstinence-only policies, but becoming pregnant at 17 (or was she sixteen when it began?) is still hardly the norm.

Where danger lurks for Sarah Palin is that Bristol's pregnancy will alter the way voters think about her evangelical pentacostalism. For teen pregnancy can be thought of not only as the result, but, in a sense, the secret agenda of evangelical 'family values'. The trouble with Palin on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday was that it was difficult to criticize her hard-line evangelical conservatism without sounding like she should have aborted Trig, her baby who suffers from down-syndrome. But now with Bristol's pregnancy, it's all getting a bit out of control. There are all together too many children in the Palin orbit. Becoming a grandmother at 44 is simply not the American dream. Although the media tends to present the white working-class as a cultural monolith, there's a world of difference in the cultural attitudes of (largely Catholic) working class whites who live in the suburbs of major Midwestern cities and the kind of evangelical millennarians who pack up and move to Wasilla, Alaska. Palin's endlessly proliferating progeny might play well in Salt Lake City, but how about among union members in Akron, Ohio? Whereas at first it seemed that the existence of Trig put Palin's pentacostalism off-limits, or somehow beyond reproach, Bristol's pregnancy once again invites to consider whether we really want a religious extremist with her finger on the nuclear trigger.