Republican Scott Brown has seemingly calculated the only way he will be able to serve a second Senate term in Massachusetts is if he successfully leaves his party in the dust. 
 
 In his second high-stakes debate with Democrat Elizabeth Warren, Brown declined to pledge to be a reliable ally of a President Mitt Romney, wavered on supporting Mitch McConnell for majority leader and lauded Sen. John Kerry’s ability to serve as secretary of state. 
 
 Text Size - 
 
 + 
 
 reset 
 
 The freshman incumbent will need to pull approximately 20 percent of President Obama’s voters in order to beat back Warren’s challenge and his approach at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell on Monday night only reinforced that steep, tricky climb in the deeply blue Bay State. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Banks picking up donations to Brown) 
 
 Even after being pressed repeatedly by moderator David Gregory of NBC’s “Meet The Press” about his allegiance to Romney, Brown refused to utter the GOP standard-bearer’s name. 
 
 “He’s out campaigning all over the country. I’m here in Massachusetts. I’m running in Massachusetts. And while I said he would handle the economic issues well, we certainly need to start focusing on those economic issues,” he said. 
 
 When Gregory pushed Brown on declaring his vote for majority leader, at first Brown demurred, instead choosing to take a shot at Warren’s failure to name a GOP senator whom she would work with other than Indiana’s Dick Lugar, who was defeated in a May primary. 
 
 “He’s not going to be there. That is a problem,” Warren conceded when reminded of the Hoosier’s loss to Richard Mourdock. 
 
 But while Brown also praised Lugar’s bipartisan legacy, he issued a harsher assessment of the Kentucky senator who hopes to ascend to majority leader if Republicans can flip four seats on Election Day. 
 
 “I already let it be very clearly known to Mitch McConnell that I’m completely disgusted as to what’s going on down there. He has a lot of work to do to earn my vote because I don’t work for him or Harry Reid. That’s the beauty of being independent,” Brown responded. 
 
 Yet, which party controls the U.S. Senate has increasingly become a mantra of the Warren campaign. A survey taken by Mass.INC showing Warren up by 4 percentage points, also noted that close to 6 in 10 voters prefer a Democratic-controlled Senate. The candidate herself said that Brown’s public rhetoric isn’t consistent with what he’s telling GOP donors when he travels the country raising money. 
 
 “What he says to people around this country is that they should contribute to his campaign because if he’s reelected, that increases the odds that the Republicans will control the Senate and that he can block President Obama’s agenda. So, let’s just be honest about what’s going on here,” she said to raucous applause by a live audience. 
 
 When Warren interrupted Brown’s explanation on a litany of legislation she cited, the senator delivered what might have been the line of the night: “Excuse me, I’m not a student in your classroom, please let me respond.” ||||| LOWELL — The second debate between Senator Scott Brown and Democrat challenger Elizabeth Warren featured a lot of friction but not much new illumination, lacking a game-changing moment even if it was marked by two stumbles that illustrate lingering challenges for each candidate. 
 
 For Brown, the Republican incumbent, it came when his careful efforts to modulate his apparent dislike for Warren slipped and he asked her to stop interrupting. 
 
 “Excuse me, I’m not a student in your classroom,” he told the Harvard Law School professor. 
 
 Advertisement - Continue Reading Below 
 
 The tartness stirred boos from Warren supporters in the crowd of some 5,700 at the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Tsongas Center, a huge audience that gave Brown and Warren the aura of gladiators as they squared off on the arena floor. 
 
 It also was unlikely to wear well with viewers of their first debate on Sept. 20, many of whom remarked that Brown was too hot-headed in that encounter. Both occasions have fueled questions about Brown’s true temperament, and whether his carefully honed nice-guy, everyman image is just that, an image. 
 
 Yet Warren raised questions about her own authenticity, although not in response to another series of opening questions about her Native American heritage. 
 
 She countered them with perhaps her best explanation yet of the campaign, saying, at root, the issue is not whether she has a character flaw, as Brown has suggested. He has accused her of using unjustified claims of minority status to advance her academic career. 
 
 “You know, I think character is how you live your life,” Warren told moderator David Gregory, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press.” 
 
 “I am the daughter of a janitor who ended up as a professor at Harvard Law School and working for the president of the United States,” she said. “I have taught school, I have taught generations of students, and I hope occasionally inspired a few of them. And I have worked hard for 30 years to make the legal system just a little bit fairer for people.” 
 
 When Gregory pressed her for regrets, Warren said: “You know, I wish I had been faster in answering the question. But the truth is the truth.” 
 
 For Warren, though, her authenticity as a candidate — or at the very least, her articulateness — was drawn into question when she was asked to rebut the suggestion she would be overtly partisan as a senator by naming which Republican colleagues she might be able to work with in the Senate. 
 
 She immediately named Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, even though he is leaving Congress in January after being beaten in his own party primary earlier this year. Brown and Gregory replied in unison, “He’s not going to be there.” 
 
 Warren then backpedaled, saying, “But he’s not going to be there, and that’s a problem.” 
 
 She then tried to right herself by avoiding specifics and saying, “It depends on what the subject matter is.” 
 
 That fueled Brown’s argument that in an overtly partisan political landscape that has exasperated and turned off many voters, he is a more bipartisan figure than Warren, putting aside, that is, his choice of ultraconservative Antonin Scalia when asked to name his model Supreme Court Justice — a moment that again elicited boos from liberals in the audience. 
 
 Warren, he said repeatedly, would be less likely than he to cross the aisle and work with the rival party. 
 
 “With regard to working with any person on the opposite side of the aisle, she couldn’t reference one person except for someone who is retiring, a truly bipartisan gentleman, Senator Lugar. I have a history since Day One,” Brown said. 
 
 Most recent polls have shown Warren with a slight lead over Brown, not an especially good place for him given that Democrats are counting on big turnout on Election Day with President Obama on the top of the ticket. 
 
 As he did throughout the debate, Brown focused on Warren’s character as a means to disqualify her from taking his seat. Yet Warren did not lack ammunition to respond. 
 
 Both Gregory in his questioning, and Warren in her counterattacks, forced Brown to explain how — with the security of a full, six-year Senate term, and the Republican Senate and White House he seeks — he would retain his bipartisan character. 
 
 In two cases, his explanations strained credibility against the clear realities of party life in Washington. 
 
 First, asked if he would support Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky to be majority leader in the Senate, Brown replied, “I have already let it be very clearly known to Mitch McConnell that I’m completely disgusted by what’s going on down there. And he has a lot of work to do to earn my vote.” 
 
 The truth, though, is that McConnell’s name will be the only one on his party’s ballot. 
 
 And when asked if he would support the economic plan rolled out by a hypothetical President Mitt Romney, Brown also tried to maintain an unlikely distance from his party’s leader. “I want to read them, see how they affect Massachusetts, our country, and our deficit, and vote,” he replied. 
 
 For Brown the Republican to win enough votes in what remains heavily Democratic Massachusetts, he has to convince a lot of voters he is sincere in those statements.
– Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren faced off last night in the second debate of the pivotal Massachusetts senate race—and both candidates suffered some awkward moments, writes Glen Johnson in the Boston Globe. Republican Brown was booed after telling an interrupting Warren, "Excuse me, I'm not a student in your classroom." And Warren was on shaky footing when asked for a Republican she would work with as a senator. Her response: Indiana's Richard Lugar, who lost his primary and thus won't be in the Senate next year. Brown hammered Warren over bipartisanship, emphasizing that he would be the first to work across the aisle, while carefully distancing himself from his own party. When moderator David Gregory asked about Mitt Romney, Brown avoided mentioning the former governor's name, Politico notes. Meanwhile, Warren offered what Johnson calls her best response so far to controversy over her Native American background. "I think character is how you live your life," she said. "I am the daughter of a janitor who ended up as a professor at Harvard Law School and working for the president of the United States."