The religious right hearts Obama!

Or at least they're not wild about McCain. That's pretty much the same thing, right? The Guardian throws its one cent into this fairly nonsensical trend piece.

Meanwhile, Dan Gilgoff rehearses the questionable talking point that evangelicals are leaving the GOP. And, by way of showing how different Obama's general election fight might be from the primary, he offers this counterpoint of how Obama faired in the latter among religious voters white Catholics and evangelicals, offered w/o comment as somehow representative of "religious voters," leaving aside the fact that Obama did quite well w/ mainline Protestants and black Christians:

And Obama has struggled among religious voters in this year's Democratic primaries. In Ohio, his 2-to-1 loss among white Catholics and a 20-point loss among white evangelicals gave Hillary Clinton's campaign a second wind that kept her in the race these last three months.

That same faith-based divide undergirded Obama's losses in Pennsylvania — where Clinton took nearly 60% of weekly churchgoers — and Indiana. Heavily religious West Virginia and Kentucky, meanwhile, handed Obama his biggest defeats of this campaign, even though he appeared to have the nomination sealed up by the time voters in those states cast their ballots.

For the last time, these numbers suggest an APPALACHIA problem for Obama--a perfect storm of racial, economic, and cultural factors that heavily favored Clinton over him. It's not clear what this says about an Obama vs. McCain match-up. But it IS clear that is says almost nothing about Obama and religious voters generally. And it's astonishing that people continue to talk about Obama's problems w/ "white Catholics" and "white evangelicals" in terms of religion and not racism.