Strategists were biggest enablers, writes Andrew Coyne.
Ford displays its standard playbook
No one seems to know how to get Toronto out of its mayoral mess. It is the product of a flawed civic architecture that, in all fairness, never contemplated the existence of a mayor so mountainously incontinent, yet so impervious to shame, as to make his continuation in the office at once both intolerable and inescapable. He must go and yet will not, and he will not go for the same reason that he must.
Not only have we never witnessed brazenness on this scale, we’ve never even imagined it. Any other public figure would have resigned long ago in the face of even one of the series of increasingly mortifying scandals in which Rob Ford has been the featured player. But then, anyone with the self-respect or the self-awareness to resign would never have amassed such a record in the first place.
He will not resign. And because he won’t, Toronto appears to be stuck with him. The council can strip away nearly all of his powers, as it is in the process of doing, but it cannot actually depose him. The province can, but will not intervene unless the council invites it to. And the council will not — in part because it suits the political interests of not a few councillors to leave him in place.
So: He cannot be abided and he cannot be removed. Not, that is, unless he were to be imprisoned on conviction of a crime (or else missed three consecutive council meetings, one of the few grounds for removal specifically enumerated in the city bylaws). That remains a possibility. The list of crimes to which the mayor has admitted, from driving while drunk to possession of illegal drugs, continues to grow. The list of crimes and misdemeanours of which he is accused by others is even longer. The mayor’s vehement denials of these fresh allegations must be weighed against his no less vehement denials of the ones he now admits.
And hovering over all are the mayor’s many connections to figures whose taste for criminality is a matter of public record, from the boyhood friends who, like the mayor, never seem to have left boyhood — their only fixed address seemingly their parents’ basements, their hobbies a mixture of illicit substances and beating up their parents — to the gang members whose company he has kept on at least one occasion, and with whom he may have smoked the odd bit of crack.
An amazing number of the mayor’s acquaintances seem to end up dead, wounded, on drugs or in jail. And of these several seem to have taken an interest in the famous cellphone video of the mayor allegedly smoking crack. Of the three alleged gang members in that almost-asfamous photo taken outside the house where the video was shot, one was murdered, some days after his phone — which may have had the video on it — was stolen; a second was shot, but survived; the third is in jail.
The man who tried to shop the video around is also in jail, where he was stabbed by inmates. The house itself was invaded some days after the video’s existence was first reported, its inhabitants — again, friends from the mayor’s boyhood — attacked by a man armed with an instrument variously reported as a steel pipe or an expandable baton, who accosted them by name and demanded to know where the video was. Meanwhile, the mayor’s driver and closest confidant, Sandro Lisi — you will remember him from the police surveillance reports of him and the mayor surreptitiously ex- changing suspicious packages in public places — is charged with extortion, apparently in connection with attempts to retrieve the video.
At the very least, the revelation that the mayor who advocated a get-tough policy with gangs and a zero-tolerance policy on drugs was himself involved with both gangs and drugs would strike some as hypocritical. But it raises much more troubling questions, not least for the police: When you are in the midst of a year-long investigation of drug gangs, it is unhelpful to discover the mayor is one of the people you have to keep under surveillance. It may be that the police’s reluctance to pursue matters further with the mayor is explained by that larger inquiry. Who knows? Maybe the mayor was working under cover.
And yet — there Ford sits, immovably: disgraced, largely powerless, but still the mayor. Is that his fault? The city’s? Or is it the fault of those who put him there in the first place, and sustained him through the long train wreck that followed: the staff who failed to report his misdeeds; the commentators who excused them; the partisans who ignored them. Disasters on the Ford scale, we are taught, do not just happen, and while the mayor’s endless supply of lies, manipulativeness and sheer chutzpah have helped to preserve him in office until now, he could not have done it alone.
And of all his enablers, the most culpable are the strategists, the ones who fashioned his image as the defender of the little guy, the suburban strivers, against the downtown elites, with their degrees and their symphonies — the ones who turned a bundle of inchoate resentments into Ford Nation. Sound familiar? It is the same condescending populism, the same aggressively dumb, harshly divisive message that has become the playbook for the right generally in this country, in all its contempt for learning, its disdain for facts, its disrespect of convention and debasing of standards. They can try to run away from him now, but they made this monster, and they will own him for years to come.
Get help? He’s had plenty.