Sarah Palin and Levi Johnston: How They Took America

Of all the outcomes of the 2008 presidential election, the strangest, beyond the rise of Sarah Palin herself, is the success of Levi Johnston.

He, in fact, may be the antidote to her rise, dogging her with his smile and his scabrous asides.

Or, as likely, they enable each other. Both stoke the other's publicity machine. Levi wouldn't be anything without Sarah. Sarah might well have been just an ordinary failed VP candidate were it not for the too-late-to-do-anything-about-it revelation that Levi had gotten 17-year-old Bristol pregnant. That's the story that most rescued Palin from political mediocrity and VP invisibility.

Hers was an anarchic move, not telling the McCain people of the slightly more than problematic fact that she had a pregnant teenage daughter: She decided to just let the chips fall as they may. It was a decision that produced an anarchic result: Levi himself.

She unleashed him.

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