Levi Johnston: Just Another of Sarah Palin’s Discards

I remember reading in the weeks after John McCain named Sarah Palin as his running mate, that she was known in Alaska for using people and then discarding them when they were no longer a political asset for her.

I think that’s what’s happening to Levi Johnston right now. Actually, I think it’s happening to Bristol, too — but Sarah Palin is Bristol’s mother, so she cannot be kicked to the curb in the same public way. Mother Palin used the relationship between Levi Johnston and her daughter because she thought the narrative they represented — teenage daughter becomes pregnant, decides to keep the baby and marry the boyfriend, boyfriend gets a job to support his new family, etc., etc. — would resonate with her fundamentalist far right base. But notice that the marriage plans stuff always came from mom — never from the young lady who supposedly was getting married. Momma was writing the narrative as she went along.

Levi has said that Sarah Palin pushed him to participate in the campaign, and that the internal pressures of the campaign put stress on his relationship with Bristol. That, and the fact that Gov. Palin has insisted on publicizing every private conflict and family dysfunction that occurs (including having an official family spokesperson castigate Levi in the pages of People magazine for going on Tyra Banks and telling her audience what most likely is the truth: that Sarah Palin knew Bristol and Levi were having sex in the governor’s home and (obviously) let it go on). Was it cheesy for Levi to go on the Tyra Banks show and share these details with the world? Yeah, sure it was. But what adjective(s) should one apply to Sarah Palin — Bristol’s mother and Levi’s almost mother-in-law — attacking her daughter’s ex-boyfriend in the pages of a national magazine? I mean, what Levi did may have been immature, but for jeebus’s sake, he is 18 years old! And Sarah Palin is 45. In the annals of inappropriateness, I think a 45-year-old woman, a mother — and a mother-figure to her daughter’s boyfriend — lashing out in public at an 18-year-old kid because he said some stuff that embarrassed her is truly astonishing.

When I look at and listen to Levi Johnston, I see and hear a young man, barely out of childhood, who is reeling from the breakup of a serious romantic relationship, trying to manage his feelings about that, and the fact he is now a father, and wanting very badly to see his child and be part of his life, and all of this being played out in excruciating detail in public. It should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of compassion, not to mention common sense, that it would be much, much more difficult for an 18-year-old to handle such adult pressures in a consistently mature way than it would be (or should be) for a 45-year-old woman, for god’s sake.

I think her behavior is unforgivable. As a mother — and a mother whose child is in that same age group — I am just appalled. And I feel very bad for both Bristol and Levi — yes, even though I don’t know them.

And it seems I am not the only one (emphasis mine):

Erickson [Erick Erickson, of RedState], a Palin defender, believes Levi is bashing the Alaska Governor to make money. Palin critics like Andrew [Sullivan] and Amanda Marcotte are relishing the Johnston-Palin brouhaha as an example of Republican class politics backfiring. But I think this whole situation is a lot more basic than that. If you watch Levi’s interviews with Tyra Banks and CBS, what you’ll see is a kid who had a baby and then had a falling out with the baby’s mother (and her mother) and is now desperate to still play a role in his son’s life–which is something his son’s mom and her family don’t seem very eager for him to do. I realize that the prominence of the people involved makes this a very tabloid-ish tale, but I think it’s a human one, too. And I wish the left and the right would remember that as they turn this family feud into spectator sport. (Fat chance, I know.)

And again, in a later post:

… At the end of the day, I do blame Sarah Palin for all this. As I’ve written before, I think she put her own ambition ahead of her family’s interests when she accepted McCain’s offer to be his running mate, since she had to know that, by doing so, she’d be subjecting her pregnant teenage daughter to the sort of media scrutiny (and ridicule) no one should ever bring upon her own child.