[URBAN NOTE] "Ignore Ford at your own peril"

[rfmcdonald]

Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc warns that Torontonians really should not dismiss the possibility that Rob Ford might be re-elected. That's how he got in back in 2010, after all.

There’s an old and somewhat misleading trope that in Toronto politics, the real campaign doesn’t begin until after Labour Day because that’s when voters start to pay attention. Do they? The reality, back in 2010, was that Smitherman was a dead man walking by the beginning of September. Ford had taken a firm lead in the polls in June, precipitating an internal crisis in the Smitherman camp. Some of his advisors wanted him to tack left, others felt he should go right.

As with the 2008 global credit crisis — which only a handful of professionally pessimistic economists predicted before it was too late — just a few political insiders believed that a Ford victory in 2010 was within the realm of possibility.

There was a lot of denial. Many people — myself included — reckoned that Smitherman and his impeccably well connected, lavishly financed campaign team would succeed in arresting Ford’s ascendency before it was too late. Insiders figured that during the final two months, with the intensive scrutiny that adheres in the final laps, a sufficient number of voters would wake up to the disaster of a Ford victory and come to their senses.

Within the Smitherman camp, however, a growing number of his advisors arrived at the Labour Day turning point with a queasy feeling. Pollster Michael Marzollini’s view, which prevailed, was that Smitherman needed to move sharply right, and demonstrate that he wasn’t going to be some kind of tax-happy Liberal planning to spend like a drunken sailor (sound familiar?). Smitherman pledged to bird-dog a vigorous cost-cutting campaign, freeze taxes for a year, cancel the vehicle registration tax (even Joe Pantalone promised that too) and underwrite his transit plan using a mysterious financing formula that seemed to involve the private sector.

[. . .]

The latest Forum poll once again raises the chilly spectre of denial, as well as Ford’s uncanny ability to capitalize on the disbelief of those who are paid to chart a path across the sprawling geography of our civic discontent.

It seems like just yesterday that we were listening to John Tory’s spin doctors confidently state, in background interviews, that Ford has “no room to grow” beyond the 20-odd percent of Toronto voters who would support a washing machine if it pledged to freeze taxes. Well, it seems he grew.