Ford as Trump? A weak link for tired Liberals

staff, recently sentenced to four months for his role in trying to destroy gas plantrelated emails.

The next day, speaking to reporters, Wynne waxed nostalgic about the dignified days of John Robarts and Bill Davis and then went wide. “Let’s just call this ... out for what it is. Doug Ford sounds like Donald Trump, and that’s because he is like Donald Trump,” she said. “He believes in ugly, vicious brand of politics that traffics and smears and lies. He’ll say anything about anyone at any time because just like Trump, it is all about him.”

She was just getting started.

“Michelle Obama, whom I admire greatly, recommended that when they go low, we should go high. I loved that idea when she said it, until we ended up with Donald Trump in the White House,” said Wynne. “So, I’m sorry, but not again. Not here, not in Ontario. I’m not going to go high. I’m not going to go low.”

(On Friday, Liberal campaign director David Herle called Ford “a dick” on live television.)

“I’m going to call that bullying behaviour out for what it is,” Wynne continued, Elgar’s Land of Hope and Glory fading up in the background (not really). “I will fight him on behalf of the people, the families, the babies, the moms, the dads, the grandmas, the aunts and the uncles all over this province.”

Well. Crikey. In case you missed it, the Trump link here was Ford’s talk of Liberals going to jail. “He all but chanted, ‘Lock her up,’ talking about me,” Wynne complained. “All but” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, it seems to me, but in any event we went through all this in 2016, and I thought we learned something. The vast majority of people who chant “lock her up” about Clinton, or who say “Kathleen Wynne ought to be in jail,” are not actually envisioning some kind of last-days-of-communism drumhead show trial followed by indefinite imprisonment. Liberals tried to make that case about Trump and his supporters, and to normal people they just seemed unhinged.

It is not generally accepted as good strategy to define your opponent as a flesh-eating space monster, lest he look rather good by comparison to the unfamiliar. People don’t like Trump, Herle is being paid handsomely for his expertise, and I’m just an unfrozen caveman columnist, but this is Doug Ford we’re talking about. This is a man who walks around actually boasting of his time at Toronto City Hall, claiming his late brother’s steaming mess of an administration as his own and talking about it as if it were the New Deal. We’re talking about the president of the United States ... why?

There is plenty of time to attack Ford on that record, to be sure. But the longer the Liberals spend pointing at him and yelling “Trump!” the odder, more desperate and tired they look.