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The politician-to-pundit route: Scott Brown to guest host ‘The O’Reilly Factor’

Scott Brown will guest host The O'Reilly Factor on Monday, making his politician-to-pundit, Palin-esque transformation complete.
/ Source: The Last Word

Scott Brown will guest host The O'Reilly Factor on Monday, making his politician-to-pundit, Palin-esque transformation complete.

Failed senator and sometime-nude model Scott Brown will continue his politician-to-pundit career transformation Monday by guest-hosting The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News.

Brown, who lost his Senate seat to Professor Elizabeth Warren in the November election, has been a paid contributor at Fox News since February. His gig on O’Reilly, the network’s highest rated show, will be the former senator’s most prominent TV appearance to date.

Speculation about Brown’s political future was effectively quashed earlier this month after he took took a job at the Boston law firm Nixon Peabody. Before that, a number of pundits theorized that Brown would jump into the special election for John Kerry’s vacant senate seat. Brown had won his place in the Senate, after all, in the special election for the late Ted Kennedy’s seat.

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell had his doubts about “loser Scott Brown’s” political ambitions after his loss in November. The Last Word host accused Brown of running a Senate campaign ”worthy of the thugs in my old Boston neighborhood” in a Rewrite segment in January.

“You heard it here first, which is to say you’re hearing it right now—Scott Brown probably won’t even run against Ed Markey,” O’Donnell predicted on January 8, after Markey, a longtime Massachusetts representative, threw his hat in the ring for Kerry’s seat. O’Donnell said a run at the Massachusetts’ governorship would be a more feasible option for the Republican Brown.

But even that prediction overestimated Brown’s desire to stay in politics. When news broke about the former senator’s lobbying position at Nixon Peabody, O’Donnell knew the jig was up. “Scott Brown is smart enough to know that he cannot go off and become a lobbyist and then take that dreaded occupation onto a debate stage as a candidate for anything ever again,” he said. “This is Scott Brown’s full Palin: take Fox News’s money, and then go for the money anywhere else he can. Like Sarah Palin, Scott Brown is all about the money now.”

It remains to be seen whether Brown’s tenure at Fox News will be more successful than Palin’s: she was dropped from the network at the beginning of the year.