THE CUTE ONE

Boston Globe today:

Senator-elect Scott Brown arrived in the nation's capital yesterday to a reception fit for a celebrity, greeted by spontaneous applause in the marble hallways of the Russell Senate Office building, invited to a spaghetti lunch with Senate Republicans, and smothered by reporters....

AP:

Washington greeted the Cosmopolitan centerfold, followed through the complex by a camera-clicking mob, more like movie idol Brad Pitt -- who created a major fuss at the Capitol in March -- than Jimmy Stewart's Mr. Smith who went to Washington.

The pols think he's dreamy. So does the press. So, we're told, do rank-and-file voters.

Um, isn't it about time for someone to start scottbrownisyournewbicycle.com?

(Or, to make it a bit more apropos, should it be scottbrownisyournewpickuptruck.com? After all, his truck is being fetishized.)

Or would the idea that Republicans and other Browniacs are acting like schoolgirls at a Justin Bieber concert not be "sticky" because, we'll be told, only Democrats act like that, even though Republicans have responded that way to George W. Bush and Sarah Palin as well as Brown in just the past decade (and I'm not even mentioning the necrophiliac crush they have on Reagan, or the near-necrophiliac one many of them have on, God help us, Dick Cheney)?

As Kevin Drum said today:

Did a lot of people really think Obama would be a miracle worker? I don't personally know of a single person who felt that way, and the fact that he got huge crowds for his speeches means only that he was a charismatic guy, lots of people liked what he had to say, and liberals were stoked at the prospect of dumping Bush and Cheney. Sure, maybe a few thought he was the salvation of American politics, but there's really not much evidence that this was a very widespread belief -- and no evidence at all that Obama himself ever believed it.

In fact, this is mostly the triumph of a conservative narrative. It was conservatives who spent months during the 2008 campaign taunting Obama for his alleged messiah status and it was conservatives who were constantly misquoting him about being "The One" or griping about how he thought his silver tongue could save the world and induce vicious dictators to swoon.

So why don't we turn the tables? If he's the new GOP rock star, Palin with a penis, or even if we could merely make a plausible case that he's being regarded that way, why can't we put him in an ad with Paris Hilton?