Scott Brown and the Palin Path: Will He Choose Brassy or Boring?

Scott Brown is at a crossroads. Does the new Massachusetts senator follow the celebrity path blazed by Sarah Palin, or adopt the lower-key political model favored by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Al Franken when they were Senate newbies?

As he starts his first week of senatorial votes and other duties, Brown says he wants to get to work. But early indications suggest it's going to take work, and considerable will power, to tamp down his personality, fend off the attention, put his nose to the grindstone and become as boring as those other famous freshmen.

Norm Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, advised his good friend Franken on how to make the transition from biting comedy to senatorial dignity. That's been terribly disappointing for Congress watchers, but probably is helping Franken stay in the good graces of Minnesotans. At the risk of becoming known as a one-man Campaign Against a Colorful Senate, Ornstein agreed to tell me what he'd say to Brown, if asked (which he hasn't been).

The gist is that there's rarely a second chance to make a first impression. "So will the initial view be the centerfold nude model who used his good looks to come to Washington and now has been smitten by the attention and [is] flitting from talk show to talk show and reveling in celebrity?" Ornstein asked. "Or does it become, 'Boy, this guy's a serious legislator!' " The index card (or Twitter) version of Ornstein's advice: "Less Jay Leno, more markups."

At this point the path of least resistance for Brown would be the Palin model. For better and for worse, he's got everything it takes to achieve Palinesque fame and fortune:

The back story. He's not a frontiersman who hunts moose, but he is a lawyer, a state senator, a triathlete, a 30-year National Guardsman, husband of a television journalist and father of an "American Idol" semifinalist. He's also a child of divorce whose parents each remarried three times, whose mother was on welfare and who says he got "knocked around pretty good" trying to rescue her from violent stepfathers. In the campaign, Brown sometimes came off as condescending – but he "choked up" in November as he told the Boston Globe about being arrested at age 12 for stealing some vinyl records. The big tough guy also has a little dog named Snuggles.

The attention. Brown's celebrity status arrived as abruptly as Palin's. One day he was eating his usual breakfast at a local joint and the next day the meal had a new name: The Scott Brown Special. His local paper breathlessly solicited photos and memories of brushes with Brown ("Have you sat on a bleacher with Scott and Gail while daughters Ayla and Arianna played basketball? Been thrilled by an Ayla Brown singing performance? Shared a laugh with the Browns around their hometown of Wrentham?").

The instant stardom goes way beyond his state. Since the election, Brown has been on NBC's "Jay Leno Show" and on ABC's "This Week" with Barbara Walters. When he repaired to the Dubliner pub near the Capitol last week to drink a Guinness, it did not go unnoticed. Before he was even sworn in, Brown was parodied on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" as a raunchy sex object played by AMC's "Mad Men" heart-throb Jon Hamm. Which brings us to . . .

The sex appeal. Palin is a former beauty pageant contestant – in 1984 she was Miss Wasilla and competed in the Miss Alaska contest. As we all know – even Congress nerds like Ornstein know – Brown posed nude for Cosmopolitan magazine in 1982. And get a load of these recent back-to-back posts at MediaBistro.com. One says "McDreamy McBrown Gets Sworn In." The other one asks, "Will Palin Sit on Wallace's Lap?" (Don Imus to Fox's Chris Wallace: "When you interview her, will she be sitting on your lap?" Wallace to Imus: "One can only hope.")

Brown may also share some of Palin's less helpful political traits – such as saying things that aren't true. Moments after he was sworn in last week, for instance, he said the $787 billion stimulus program "didn't create one new job" in the country. "It didn't create one new job?" a reporter asked. "That's correct," Brown said. Actually, it's incorrect – by many orders of magnitude.

Brown also got it wrong when he said on "This Week" last month that federal employees make twice as much as their private counterparts. And in a Jan. 28 interview with the Associated Press, Brown said of Palin that "I've never spoken with her. She's never reached out, vice versa." However, Palin had called him on election night and congratulated him. A spokesman said later that the call had slipped Brown's mind.

On at least one occasion, Brown publicly exhibited a Palin-like capacity to hold, and act on, grudges. It was early 2007. Joe Ferreira, a history teacher at King Philip Regional High School, had showed students a letter he'd written to Brown and other legislators, criticizing their stand against gay marriage. At the time, Ferreira admitted he'd gone on a "rant." He told me last week that the point, "rightly or wrongly," had been to encourage students to get involved in politics and government.

Brown requested time with the students to discuss his views. Then, unbeknownst to Ferreira, several students started a Facebook page about the upcoming visit and it attracted obscene comments about Brown and his family. Brown found out about the page, and in his talk he criticized the offending students by name. According to Ferreira, the history department head ended the session after trying and failing to get Brown to stop using the F-word in quoting from the posts.

The episode made it into Massachusetts newspapers and stayed alive for a while on talk radio. "It got way out of control. It became a circus," Ferreira said. He's still irked that Brown accused him publicly of holding student grades "hostage to my political ideologies, which is absurd beyond belief." Brown's hometown paper wasn't pleased, either; the editorial board said he had diminished his stature as a grown-up. But others, such as Globe columnist Brian McGrory, defended Brown. "If a state senator can't stand up to a few coddled creeps in a high school classroom, then who can?" McGrory asked.

Now that would be an interesting U.S. senator to cover.

There have been other speak-now, second-guess-later moments in Brown's public life. In 2001, for instance, he said it was "not normal" for then-state senator Cheryl Jacques and her female partner to have children. He later apologized. More recently, on election night, he told millions of TV viewers that his two college-age daughters were "available." The audience roared, his daughters looked mortified and he immediately tried to take it back. More of that please, Sen. Brown, unless you want to go the Ornstein-Franken-Clinton-Obama route.

It's easy to understand the pull of Palin and the Tea Party. To them, at this hopeful early stage, Brown is a hero. Palin is claiming Brown as a kindred spirit who just wants to "put our government back on the side of the people." This is how she opened her speech in Nashville over the weekend: "In many ways, Scott Brown represents what this beautiful movement is all about. You know, he was just a guy with a truck and a passion to serve our country."

Just a guy with a truck, a passion, a political career, a legal career, a military career, a home, a vacation home, an Aruba timeshare, three condos -- and records on abortion, cap-and-trade and health reform that would make most Tea Party devotees blanch.

Hmmm, maybe that low-key, studious, collegial approach might be best after all. As Clinton and Obama recently proved, it can pack quite a punch when you're ready to run for president.

Update: Brown plans to write an inspirational book about his life. That is part of the Palin model, but he's also following in the footsteps of best-selling autobiography authors Obama, Clinton and (fictionally) Franken.