By- Suzie-Q @ 8:50 PM MST
This Week’s Palin Primer From Alaska: Bristol and Levi, Earmarks, Troopergate, More
Donald Craig Mitchell
Huffington Post- Off The Bus
Posted September 17, 2008 | 09:42 AM (EST)
“Bristol Stared Straight Ahead And Levi Had The Glazed Look Of A Trapped Feral Animal”
It has been forty-eight hours since I have had a call from any agent of any national news organization. So the fun that those of us on the outer ring of the commotion have been having since the announcement of the Palin ascendancy may be about over.
Assuming so, here in the subarctic there have been several new developments in which those of you who aren’t here in the subarctic may be interested.
Anchorage Pep Rally
As is my habit, last Saturday morning I biked over to Sagaya to have a cup of coffee and read the Anchorage Daily News. When I opened the paper, on the front page was an article which reported that at 9:30 am Sarah would be appearing at a pep rally at the Anchorage convention center.
When I walked into the convention center the Wasilla High School Warriors pep band was playing and five hundred or so Palinistas holding “Welcome Home” signs were chanting “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah.”
Because the convention center holds 5,000 people, the McCain advance team cleverly sandwiched the small crowd between twenty-foot-tall movie screens and then blackened the rest of the room. So on TV the crowd may have looked larger that it was. In TV view behind the podium the advance team also erected a bleacher on which a hundred or so people were sitting, most waving “McCain-Palin” signs.
Sarah arrived and spoke for half an hour (mixing Alaska material with a rote repeat of “best of” snippets from her acceptance speech at the Republican Convention). Then for another half hour she signed autographs while surrounded by seven or eight watchful-looking forty-year-old guys (and one girl) in black suits with phone wires running out of their collars and into their ears.
Because none of that was particularly surprising, I wouldn’t waste time reporting on it except for two reasons.
First, sitting on the bleacher clapping enthusiastically whenever Sarah delivered one of her applause lines was Randy Ruedrich, the chairman of the Alaska Republican Party whose misbehavior on the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission gave Sarah her start. Since until she became McCain’s running mate Randy had less than no use for Sarah Palin, watching him pretend in front of the television cameras that he is a Palinista was fabulously entertaining.
Second, sitting three-quarters of the way up the bleacher was Bristol Palin and her eighteen-year-old impregnator, Levi Johnston. Once I noticed them, I kept my eye on Bristol and Levi. What I learned provoked an odd empathy for the awful pickle Wasilla High School’s hockey stick wielding homeboy now finds himself in.
Bristol and Levi sat shoulder-to-shoulder. But not once did they look at each other, speak to each other, or in any way acknowledge each other’s physical presence. Not once. For an entire hour. Instead, Bristol stared straight ahead and Levi had the glazed look of a trapped feral animal.
Then when Sarah wound up her autograph signing and the people sitting in front of him on the bleacher began climbing down, Levi stood up and, without looking at or speaking to his betrothed, turned in the opposite direction and walked away.
What I took away from that is that the People Magazine spin about how excited the happy couple is about their upcoming nuptials and Levi’s “Bristol” finger tattoo is the Karl Rovian nonsense that anyone who thinks about it for a scintilla of a second intuitively knows that it is. If McCain-Palin lose, my easy bet is that there will be no nuptials. But if they win, the hand Levi dealt himself by having had the poor luck to knock up the daughter of the Vice President of the United States (at the time who could have known?) will have to be played out.
Pader Johnston has disconnected the Johnston family’s land line. So I can’t call him to ask what kind of deal he cut. But if Levi was my kid, the deal I would have cut would, at an absolute minimum, have been: $500,000 for from now to the November election. If McCain-Palin win, a $ 1 million signing bonus to take the trip down the aisle. Then, for the duration of the McCain-Palin administration, $100,000 a month for every month Mr. and Mrs. Johnston live under the same roof, and $50,000 a month for every month that they remain married but do not.
That’s chump change for the RNC. And if, in the best case for the nation, it turns out to be only a $500,000 payday for sixty days of work, that’s a life changing grubstake for an eighteen-year-old kid and more than enough to enable Levi to make his child support payments.