Silly Little Country

I Have Never Claimed to be Perfect

MacLeans has a wonderful article on the Toronto mayorlaty campaign.
It was indeed a very strange campaign:

...arranged for a press conference the next day, when Ford told reporters the whole story—the very story he’d neglected to tell his own handlers months earlier. “The reason I forgot about the marijuana charge . . . is because that same evening, I was charged with failing to give a breath sample,” he told reporters, following a tightly scripted confession. “I have never claimed to be perfect.”
Though initially surprised by the DUI revelation, Ciano and Kouvalis were unperturbed. “I said, ‘Just watch,’ ” recalls Ciano, a former national vice-president of the Conservative Party of Canada. “We’re going to go up after this.” Sure enough, Ford’s team of campaign outsiders—young, new to Toronto, arguably from the fringes of Canada’s political mainstream—watched as Ford’s popularity rose in the days following his DUI confession. Still, they were awestruck by the extent of the bump. “We didn’t think we’d go up 10 points,” Ciano says.

As Joy Behar has perhaps learned (I am not sure she is capable of learning) from the Sharron Angle kerfuffle:

His handlers delight in pointing out that the barbs directed at Ford—a Stephen Marche Globe and Mail column that used the word “fat” 17 times, say—merely generated more donations to his campaign. So did his Everyman lack of sophistication. “Our polling said, don’t put him in a $2,000 suit,” says Kouvalis.

There is a certain irony in the fact that of all the candidates Ford was probably the most capable of routinely buying a $2,000 suit.
And it is such a treat when the enemy scores own goals:

In the end, Kouvalis had a secret weapon: he knew the Smitherman team had been operating off provincial Liberal databases—Dalton McGuinty’s lists, people the Ford team’s own intel said were going to vote Ford. On election day, Ford’s campaign concentrated on getting out its vote, knowing that the Smitherman team’s push would bring out a good number of Ford voters too. “They were pulling in our vote for us,” he says.

We have some interesting years ahead!

posted by Alan Adamson @ 1:02 PM