Vanity Fair has some excerpts an upcoming story in which Levi Johnston discussed living in Palin Place:
The Palin house was much different from what many people expect of a normal family, even before she was nominated for vice president. There wasn’t much parenting in that house. Sarah doesn’t cook, Todd doesn’t cook—the kids would do it all themselves: cook, clean, do the laundry, and get ready for school. Most of the time Bristol would help her youngest sister with her homework, and I’d barbecue chicken or steak on the grill…
Sarah told me she had a great idea: we would keep it a secret—nobody would know that Bristol was pregnant. She told me that once Bristol had the baby she and Todd would adopt him. That way, she said, Bristol and I didn’t have to worry about anything. Sarah kept mentioning this plan. She was nagging—she wouldn’t give up. She would say, “So, are you gonna let me adopt him?” We both kept telling her we were definitely not going to let her adopt the baby. I think Sarah wanted to make Bristol look good, and she didn’t want people to know that her 17-year-old daughter was going to have a kid.
The Daily Dish is excited over the second paragraph:
So, according to Levi, Governor Palin was very, very interested in avoiding embarrassment for her daughter – and a political problem – by passing off someone else’s child as her own and adopting him. This kid’s name was Tripp. But this exercise is called “proof of principle.” If anyone believed that Palin wasn’t nutty enough to try to pass off her own daughter’s baby as her own, they need to reassess.
I could see where Andrew Sullivan’s blog would see some vindication in this. It supports his theory but still doesn’t prove anything. It is even possible that Johnston got some ideas from Sullivan. Besides, the question was never whether it was possible that Sullivan was right but that he seemed overly preoccupied with the issue. After all, if Palin had adopted a daughter’s child to avoid family scandal, this would be the least of all the reasons to vote against her.
Johnston also had some comments related to Palin’s decision to step down as governor:
Sarah was sad for a while. She walked around the house pouting. I had assumed she was going to go back to her job as governor, but a week or two after she got back she started talking about how nice it would be to quit and write a book or do a show and make “triple the money.” It was, to her, “not as hard.” She would blatantly say, “I want to just take this money and quit being governor.” She started to say it frequently, but she didn’t know how to do it. When she came home from work, it seemed like she was more and more stressed out.
