Well, I live in Toronto now, so I'm forced to live under Mayor Rob Ford.
Two things:
1. As a city of 2.5 million people, Toronto passed the critical mass necessary for poverty and administrative incompetence to become major sources of major destabilization and social breakdown. I'm genuinely worried about personal safety as things go down the shitter.
2. The 47% of the voters (don't know what the voter participation rate was) who voted Ford will never admit that it was their guy that brought the disasters and scandals that are coming. Just like they don't admit that their hero Mike Harris was a crook who fleeced them and occasionally killed them, or that George W. Bush was a complete moron who lied his way into a disastrous war. These people NEVER admit their responsibility for anything.
As a Hamiltonian, born and bred, I followed my hometown election and I was at least glad to see that the disappointing, but union-friendly Bob Bratina won over the Larry Dianni, who was convicted of electoral finance fraud (for which he had to write an essay saying he was sorry) who used undemocratic means to push through the ecologically destructive, prone to being flooded, Red Hill Creek Expressway.
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Just like they don't admit that their hero Mike Harris was a crook who fleeced them and occasionally killed them
And also don't admit that it is because of Mike Harris that they no longer have their own local governments, with their own property tax rates and their own, much smaller and less powerful municipal unions: that, in short, everything they hate about David Miller's Toronto is a direct result of Mike Harris's megacity amalgamation.
Chet,
Oh yeah, and i heard that harris was at Ford's victory party!
The turnout was the highest in history.
Ford brought out the vote.
Deal with it.
j.
And your point is what exactly?
I don't know a whole lot about Robert Ford, but I do know this: apparently he was good at getting things done. If someone approached him with a problem, he would return the call and take care of the issue within 24 hours. Apparently that database he built up over the years helped his get out the vote efforts.
To paraphrase John Ruskin: It ain't enough to say the right thing. You have to do the right thing. Locally, I'd rather throw ideology under the bus and have a responsive left/right nutbar than an unresponsive left/right nutbar.
I've heard those things too. I've heard that about some Repug congresspeople, that they look after their constituents.
I've also heard that Ford praised the police for their unmitigated incompetence and brutality at the G20 last summer. I've also heard that Ford believes he can build four subway lines in four years while cutting taxes and doubling the police force. I've also heard that Ford brags that his office expenditures on the taxpayers are at zero, but that's because all his printing costs are absorbed by his parent's business. He doesn't seem to grasp that allowing private third-parties to pay your expenses is a recipe for corruption. I've also heard that Ford berates downtown Toronto for imposing its values and expenses on the suburbs, but then he had the architect of amalgamation, Mike Harris, at his victory party.
Finally, the same things about customer service to one's constituents was said about his distant third-place rival, Joe Pantalone, the guy I voted for, who got 10 percent of the vote.
The real thing is that Pantalone, deputy-mayor under a relatively competent, and scandal-free, left-of-centre administration was campaigning on the concept that if people want public services they have to pay for them, and that the truth of the matter is that the GTA's taxes are actually rather low and that the problem is the downloading of expenses without having been given the revenue streams to pay for them that was the fault of the provinces.
But Ford was allowed to rant and rave about a bunch of stupid, false generalities which resonated with voters who are either stupid, or ignorant, or deluded, the latter two problems generally being the deliberate goals of the corporate media.
Like Ford, a Repug who provides good work for their white, conservative constituents, is still peddling snake-oil, such as Iraq's WMDs, the Wall Street bail-outs, and the notion that evil Mexican janitors are out to reconquer the South-West United States, and other such racist, evil crap.
Meh. I don't know how you guys do things out in Toronto, but one of the (few) nice things about pols back in Wpg, MB is that for the most part they didn't give a sh*t about anything that wasn't municipal/provincial. At least the more successful ones had that attitude, and I suspect Ford had that going for him as well, though from your description he sounds like Harold Hill, which kinda sucks I guess, at least when it comes time to pay the tab.
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