THE INDEPENDENT: As voters in Massachusetts flooded polling centres yesterday to choose a successor to the late Senator Ted Kennedy, there was one image of the Republican runner, Scott Brown, that may or may not have been in their minds: half prone and naked with only a carefully placed hand hiding his most precious assets. A campaign poster this was not. Rather it was the picture of him that graced a spread inside Cosmopolitan magazine when it named him “America’s Sexiest Man” in 1982. Had it emerged sooner, the portrait could have put the brakes on the Brown insurgency. As for the Cosmopolitan spread, which appeared in the June 1982 issue, Mr Brown was at Boston College in the midst of his final law exams when it was shot. Though he surely cannot have known that one day he would compete to fill the shoes of Teddy Kennedy, he did give a hint as to his future ambitions in a brief interview when he admitted to being a “bit of a patriot”. MORE
GLENN BECK: I want a chastity belt on this man. I want his every move watched in Washington. I don’t trust this guy. This one could end with a dead intern. I’m just saying. It could end with a dead intern. MORE
HUFFINGTON POST: Massachusetts voters who backed Barack Obama in the presidential election a year ago and either switched support to Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown or simply stayed home, said in a poll conducted after the election Tuesday night that if Democrats enact tougher policies on Wall Street, they’ll be more likely to come back to the party in the next election. A majority of Obama voters who switched to Brown said that “Democratic policies were doing more to help Wall Street than Main Street.” A full 95 percent said the economy was important or very important when it came to deciding their vote. In a somewhat paradoxical finding, a plurality of voters who switched to the Republican — 37 percent — said that Democrats were not being “hard enough” in challenging Republican policies. It would be hard to find a clearer indication, it seems, that Tuesday’s vote was cast in protest. The poll also upends the conventional understanding of health care’s role in the election. A plurality of people who switched — 48 — or didn’t vote — 43 — said that they opposed the Senate health care bill. But the poll dug deeper and asked people why they opposed it. Among those Brown voters, 23 percent thought it went “too far” — but 36 percent thought it didn’t go far enough and 41 percent said they weren’t sure why they opposed it. MORE
RELATED: Burt Reynolds, then 36, showed new dimensions — and made beefcake history — when the April 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan hit the stands. There, chewing a cigarillo on a bearskin rug with a staple in his furry tummy, was Burt au naturel from head to toe. Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown says that the idea of showing male nudity (Playgirl didn’t debut until the next year) came to her while ”doing the dishes or something,” she recalls. ”I thought, why wouldn’t we enjoy looking at a man’s body?” She approached Reynolds about posing after they had both appeared on The Tonight Show. Reynolds quickly agreed to pose in nothing for nothing — ”I thought it would be a kick,” he said. Says Brown: ”He was never a scrap of trouble, and we took lots of full frontal nudity.” The magazine sold out (1.6 million copies) and, along with his work in Deliverance, which was released that fall, the centerfold put Reynolds’ career into high gear: Within a year he had his own talk show. Meanwhile, Dinah Shore quipped that the centerfold didn’t do him justice, and in interviews Reynolds joked that the chilly studio had diminished his manhood. MORE