Levi Johnston: King of All Media

Levi Johnston has become a pitchman for Wonderful Pistachios.

Image: Wonderful Pistachios

Let's just say this right up front: Levi Johnston is the King of All Media.

Laugh if you must, but the hockey-playing, Palin daughter-impregnating, bear-hunting Alaskan is everywhere—and he's completely seized the narrative surrounding his life and shown himself to be a savvy, sardonic player on the national media stage. And I'm not just saying this because one day soon I fully expect to be working for the 19-year-old Levi. I mean Mr. Johnston.

Where to begin? How about Johnston's upcoming Playgirl photo set, which the would-be model's attorney told the Associated Press is a "foregone conclusion." (Weirdly, Playgirl, which folded its print publication and went all Web in August 2008, wouldn't comment to AP. ) The photos—and we'll leave it to those who don't wish to work for Mr. Johnston to make the easy jokes about his hackishly suggestive last name in the context of tasteful nude or seminude photography—are the inevitable next step after the almost-kinda-Palin son-in-law posed shirtless for GQ in June.

In the accompanying article by John Jeremiah Sullivan, the world was introduced to Johnston's lawyer, one Rex Lamont Butler of Rex Lamont Butler & Associates of Anchorage, Alaska, and his rather large, rather intimidating colleague Tank Jones. Butler told Sullivan (and the rest of the world), “Levi is a very interesting person who has been thrown under the bus. I think you'll like him."

America clearly does like him. Let us count the ways:

Johnston wrote (or "wrote," for the cynics among us) a first-person essay for the September Vanity Fair headlined Me and Mrs. Palin that garnered a lot of attention. The guy is barely out of high school and has a feature in one of America's most respected magazines. Not bad. And let's remember that he'd also been the subject of a reverential photo slideshow on Time magazine's website in March.

But magazine articles and traffic-baiting slideshows will only take a media player so far, which explains Johnston's jump into television with his new commercial for pistachios. (The ad also features Tank Jones, who it must be said looks like a very nice guy and whom we'd never make fun of or criticize because, well, we like all our internal organs where they currently are.)

The ad, with its winking allusion to his fathering of Tripp Palin, calls to mind the old No Excuses jeans commercials from the 1980s and 1990s that featured tabloid queens like Gary Hart's old fling Donna Rice and Bill Clinton sexual-harassment accuser Paula Jones playfully acknowledging their own infamy. These ads showed that, far from allowing themselves to be "thrown under the bus" (in Rex Lamont Butler's terms), these press victims were not going to be mocked for our amusement. Or if they were, they'd at least get in on the joke. And the profits: In 1994, a young New York Times reporter named Maureen Dowd reported that Paula Jones received $50,000 for her No Excuses ad. (Like Johnston in Playgirl, Jones also posed nude for Penthouse in 2000.)

Need more proof that Johnston has arrived as a media juggernaut? Look no further than his relationship with New York Times bestselling author Kathy Griffin, with whom young Johnston walked the carpet at the Teen Choice Awards (save your jokes about teens whose choice it was) and quipped across the interviewer's desk on CNN's Larry King Live in August.

Now that he's part of a major media power couple, can there be any doubt that Johnston has arrived?

So, if you're one of those people who think Levi Johnston is just some sort joke—and one that's rapidly getting older week on week as he runs out his fifteen minutes of fame to the final, agonizing nanoseconds—well, the joke's on you, buddy. Levi and his lawyer (and Tank!) are laughing all the way to the bank. And they're all enjoying some pistachios along the way.

Nuts, man. Nuts.