Say Cheese! Or Lose.

My head is spinning since Scott Brown beat Martha Coakley in Massachusetts for the Senate seat formerly belonging to Ted Kennedy. Just about everyone's analysis is blindly the same: It's either an ideological victory for conservatives or a call to wake up from the liberals. Honestly, I'm pretty sick of it.

Considering my earlier article detailing how and why Scott Brown isn't really that fiscally conservative, perhaps we should slow our roll and take another view on why Scott Brown won. My take?

People didn't like Martha Coakley.

I don't mean her views, her reasoning, her political party, what have you. I mean people just didn't like her. They didn't like her personality, they didn't like her attitude. They didn't like how she assumed that being the Democrat, the seat was hers. They didn't like her snobbery.

And they didn't like her smile, or rather her lack of one. Let's pump the break right there and look at some photos, shall we?

GASP! The Democrat or liberal sneaking a peak at a blog entry here on the YRNetwork goes. How could a Republican be so... so mean?! I assure you that it's just what we do. Evil is the new good.

Here is a google image search for pictures of the would-have-been Senator. How many do you see of her really smiling? I'd say one, the one of her on MassLive.com at some rally for her. The rest? Tight lipped, toothless smirks or grins, or stern images of her Ben Stein impression. Scott Brown however, if you can handle his shirtlessness in some of these, is smiling like a winner, even long, long before this special election.

How're you supposed to like someone who doesn't smile? You don't. Just take a look at these fine, upstanding gentlemen:

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I'm sure by now you see the pattern emerging...

Now as you see here, the pictures that are remembered and used best are frequently those of our candidates smiling. Fact is, it doesn't take a genius to recognize that smiling just plain makes you look better. It makes you seem warmer, happier, more content. Scott Brown? That man was a smiler. Not even a botox could put one on Coakley. Whether you have W. Bush's chucklely grin, Carter's sunshine face or HW Bush's "well, at least I tried" smile, it helps. A lot.

Now of course, smiling isn't everything. A few google searches would suggest that JFK just wasn't that much of a smiler himself. But his presidential opponent was Richard Nixon, who was far less of one. Ford doesn't count much because he took office without election.

People can easily forget that politics is also a popularity contest, at least during the elections. While both sides want to spin the election as some battle of conservatism versus liberalism, it was still an election, more about winning people over than proving that you're right. In that way, an election could be view like a glorified, long interview for a job. You could be the best man or woman for the job with the right credentials and the right experience, but if people don't like you during the screening process, you're not going to get it unless they really have no choice.

Which brings us back to one election not but a year ago.

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Let's face it. The guy on the right is one handsome devil. His smile is wide, his dimples deep. Heck, if someone had very little knowledge about political issues, as quite a few Americans don't, they'd probably pick the guy on the right "just cause."

So let me ask you. When you got a man running around Massachusetts in his own pick up truck, shaking hands, smiling, and greeting people warmly, running against a woman who constantly does an impression of Tommy Lee Jones and doesn't even greet people with a handshake, it shouldn't surprise you who is going to win. Really. We shouldn't need to be reminded that politics involves a great deal of shaking hands and kissing babies.