Congratulations, Scott Brown! You are the newest member of America’s most antiquated, self-important, and sublimely ridiculous institution, the U.S. Senate. Your new job will consist of you doing little more than preventing your colleagues from getting work done and insuring that you keep this job—or move up! There are already whispers that you might run for president. Our current president was a Senator, you know, a State Senator before that, and he has two daughters. You guys are so much alike! Sure, there are differences, but nobody cares about those. They love you and they always will, provided you follow these simple steps:

1) Always run against the most incompetent opponent possible. Choosing Martha Coakley—political genius! The foresight necessary to know that she would spend the whole first week of her campaign on vacation, label a local Red Sox hero as a “Yankees Fan,” and, when pressed on her campaign style, as if she should be “standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?” is divine. Boffo political instincts, my friend. I have two words for you if 2012 is really on your radar: John Edwards.

2) Always base your campaign against something you already have and cannot lose. Massachusetts voted for you because its citizens hated the health care reform bills before Congress. They already have state-provided health care, instituted by Mitt Romney, so the only way to prevent this progressive policy—enacted by a Republican—from being superseded by Federal policy is to send another Republican down there to stop it. The GOP gets things done! Hands off our Medicare!

3) Always run the Derek Zoolander campaign. Have you ever wondered if there was more to life, other than being really, really, ridiculously good looking? Don’t! There’s not. You posed naked for Cosmo back in 1983 and publicly offered up your daughters at the post-victory party. Almost immediately, pictures of them wearing seashell bikinis circulated around the Internet, and one of them released an album. High cheekbones as political skill: dazzingly brilliant.

4) Don’t be dazzyingly brilliant. Boston College Law School is pretty good. Don’t let it go to your head, genius. No one wants nerdy-poo to solve all the nation’s problems. Mitt Romney solved health care in Massachusetts, and look what it got him.

5) Continue to let your supporters believe you’re the next coming of the Barack Obama archetype. I think you’d be the first to admit that you got some lucky breaks, just as Democrats would admit that Obama got some on his way to the White House. So you’re like totally the same. Obama brought the noise at Harvard Law School, uprooted his life to work “on the ground” in Chicago, won office in the toughest U.S. city for an outsider to do so, and beat Hillary Freaking Clinton to win the nomination for president. You drove a pickup truck around Massachusetts. So you both did something, only you did a lot less, which means you’re probably much better at driving that pickup truck than Obama is at all that other stuff. Think of all the time he wasted participating in our political system when he could have just bought a Ford F150.

6) Don’t solicit sex in an airport bathroom, run away to Argentina to be with your mistress, or have an affair with your top aide’s wife. You know what? Just don’t do anything. Anything at all. The only way you’ll torpedo your career is to participate in it.

Follow these simple steps, and you’ll be in line to run for President in 2012 as long as your good buddy Sarah doesn’t run. She wrote this playbook. Just kidding—she wouldn’t write anything herself. And neither should you. Except maybe your daughter Ayla’s phone number on the back of this “How a bill becomes a law” pamphlet. You won’t need it.

Bryan Joineris a contributing editor of Last Exit and the founder and editor of garlic, Shea Stadium, Martha’s Vineyard, A-Rod, his mother and the financial crisis.

Copyright Last Exit 2010