He was pretty young when he did that. But no, it’s not a conservative thing to do—but as I said, not a social conservative.

I think the centerfold stuff actually enhanced his appeal and contributed to his election in Massachusetts. It made it very hard to paint him as a stuffy fuddy-duddy Republican, didn’t it?

I’ve met Brown. He’s good-looking in person, too. And for what it’s worth, he sounded extremely sincere about detesting Obama and Harry Reid, and wanting to get rid of the latter’s majority.

My memory is getting pretty poor.

But, IIRC, Brown posed for Cosmo:

http://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/news/a3118/scott-brown-from-cosmo-to-congress/

Which some would maintain is not exactly a conservative thing to do.

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The zany notion that he had come over from the Democrat party was published during his early campaign — and I took that to mean that the factoid was put out by his own campaign.

At the time it made perfect campaign sense to move towards the Democrats — and to establish that he would NOT upset Massachusetts voters by ‘going Helms’ on them.

I didn’t take it any further, and being on the West Coast, I have no expertize in New England politics whatsoever. So I yield on this point.

And about that anti-Coakley vote I mentioned in a previous comment to you—the anti-Coakley vote that helped Brown get his Senate seat–

Coakley’s awfulness as a candidate is reflected in the fact that she’s not that much ahead of her rival for the governorship of Massachusetts right now. No one is paying much attention to that (it’s for governor, not the Senate) but it proves to me what a lousy candidate she was and still is. Puzzling that the Democrats keep nominating her. Don’t they have a bench?

Coakley’s Republican opponent Charlie Baker, who’s neck and neck with Coakley in the polls, is a fiscal conservative social liberal. That’s the formula for any possible Republican victory in Massachusetts—not everywhere, just Massachusetts and other states with its profile (Maine is one that comes to mind, for example). Interestingly, his father was a conservative Republican and his mother a liberal Democrat, “and the family was often drawn into political arguments at the dinner table.”

It’s never been tried for a reason.

I would guess you know very very little about the population of Massachusetts and the political viewpoints of almost the entire population: liberal. Very liberal.

By the way, Republicans have won statewide in Massachusetts, but they have always been what you might call moderate Republicans. I suppose that some conservative or other has tried to run, but has never been able to make it out of the Republican primaries. I can’t name one offhand, though.

You need a cite for the claim that Brown was a Democrat. I believe it is incorrect. His entire political career, as far as I know, was as a Republican. He was in the Massachusetts legislature since 1998, always as a Republican. His Wiki entry adds:

His father and his grandfather were Republicans. His father has said that young Scott became interested in running for political office in the mid-1960s while accompanying him on a campaign for state office. Scott Brown recalls holding campaign signs for his father.

So his earliest political experiences were also on the Republican side.

Social liberal in the sense of basically libertarian. Not in the sense of spending money on more social welfare programs.