Hardly a day goes by now without the Toronto mayoral candidate embarrassing himself and everyone around him. All things being equal, that's perhaps the only interesting aspect of the campaign to replace David Miller's titanic reign of error. I'd be lying to you if I said that I wasn't enjoying watching the spectacle. Moreover, I love that everything I predict about him proves to be true within days or weeks. It makes me look smart and therefore, deeply sexy.A number of my commenters and bloggers that I'm friendly with are supporters of Rob Ford's, although I have no idea why. I'm of the opinion that he can't win and, in the unlikely event that he did, he would set back the conservative cause in this city by decades.
Most of my commenters and friends have said that the story of Ford's Florida arrest, which he initially denied, is really no big deal. That might be the most dishonest thing that I've ever heard. If a more liberal candidate, like George Smitherman or Joe Pantalone, had Mr. Ford's criminal history and lied about it, I'm sure that they would consider it a very big deal, indeed. The idea of a "law and order" candidate with an arrest record like his is nothing short of laughable.
And it's going to hurt, if history is indication.
Some of you might remember the 2000 presidential election in the U.S. As that campaign entered it's final weekend, George W. Bush was leading Al Gore by three or four points. Then, on the last Friday afternoon of the campaign, a Democratic operative in Maine revealed that Bush had been arrested for drunk driving in Kennebunkport in 1976.
Bush ended up losing the popular vote by half a million ballots, dropping a four point lead in as many days. Had the Bush's arrest report been leaked earlier in the week, the Florida recount would almost certainly have been unnecessary and Al Gore would have been president.
Yes, I know that Rob Ford leading in the polls by as many as nine points. As I've said before, I don't place much stock in those polls. I certainly believe that they're accurate, but I don't think that they indicate anything other than a widespread disgust with the options presented before us.
We're also still more than two months away from Election Day, and I don't think that Ford's parade of humiliating revelations is anywhere near finished. I'm sure that he'll unleash at least three new scandals before this is over, mostly because he hasn't disappointed me so far. As people get nearer to making their final decision, I predict that the majority will settle on someone other than Mr. Ford.
But what if I'm wrong? It doesn't happen very often on political matters, but I'm not entirely discounting the possibility that it could. What happens if Rob Ford actually defies the laws of both politics and logic, and becomes the next mayor of Toronto?
I think that it will be disastrous to the city's gradual move to the center, let alone the center-right.
Toronto is a very, very liberal city. Think San Francisco squared, and you have a pretty good idea where this town is politically. But after decades of high spending and fiscal mismanagement, the municipal electorate is shifting ever rightward, if only on economics. That frustration is largely responsible for why Ford is the frontrunner right now. Even otherwise liberal candidates, like Smitherman and Rocco Rossi, are running as "fiscal conservatives. "
However, Mr. Ford would be to this city's emerging conservative movement what President Bush was to it's broader American counterpart.
In 2000, the GOP had decided advantages on precisely two issues: taxation and national security, but Bush didn't win on them. Instead, he won by poaching traditionally Democratic issues, such as health care and education. Republicans like to pretend otherwise, but Bush actually campaigned on things like No Child Left Behind, the Patients Bill of Rights and Medicare Part D, all of which constituted truly terrifying levels of spending.
The problem was that Bush remained committed to an supply-side economic nightmare in the face of all of his new spending. He pushed for, passed, and signed trillions of dollars in tax cuts as he doubled department budgets, the effects of which were compounded by the two wars his administration prosecuted in the wake of 9/11. The resulting deceits were far and away the highest in American history.
In his last year in office, President Bush passed a stimulus plan of his own: a $152 billion tax refund and increases in Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac guarantees. On top of that, he actively worked to pass the $700 billion TARP bill (which cost nearly as much as President Obama's 2009 stimulus bill) and pushed the Federal Reserve to guarantee untold trillions in private financial sector debt.
I don't think that very much of the Obama agenda would be politically possible without the precedent of Bush's fiscal irresponsibility to fall back. Bush, after all, made the truly awesome spending of the Reagan era seem quaint, and that laid the political groundwork for the Obama administration's spending.
By 2006, the Republican Party's reputation on both national security and fiscal responsibility were in tatters, but they also made traditionally liberal spending in education and health care more politically centrist. By doing that, they essentially invited Democratic majorities in Congress and practically invented the raison d'etre of the Obama candidacy. Barack Obama, the most liberal president in American history, was made possible by the Republican mainstreaming of liberal spending and budgetary practices.
An even cursory look at Rob Ford's platform shows that he's essentially a Bush Republican. He barely cuts a nickle for every dollar in his promised new spending in police, transportation and social services.
Although his website doesn't say so, Ford has promised massive subway expansion that even he acknowledges that he can't pay for, and knows that the federal and provincial governments won't subsidize. He proposes to get around this by having the city give away "air rights" to the ground above the proposed lines to condominium developers.
The only problem with that is the ground above the non-existent subways lines is already owned by businesses and home-owners, not the city. Although he doesn't say so, the Ford plan would involve invoking eminent domain on a scale that would cost more than the subways themselves. Given fair market property values in Toronto, that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Moreover, the city would have to spend tens of billions of dollars more in road, sewer and hydro development to service those condos.
Ford is also advocating giant cuts in services in taxes and fees, which would subsequently deprive the city of a fortune in revenue. He thinks that this can be paid for by cutting the number of city councillors; and cutting back on gardening at Nathan Phillips Square, which costs about 70 grand a year. Cutting city council, which city council would never vote to do, might save a few million dollars a year if it were passed, which it won't be.
Cutting in half the number of council seats, and the office budgets of councillors would have consequences that would tend to benefit people like Ford at the expense of everyone else. It would create far larger wards that would be incredibly more expensive to run in. Since current municipal and provincal campaign finance laws make it almost impossible for candidates to receive donations from corporations or unions, only independently wealthy candidates - like Rob Ford - would be able to run. And once elected, you would have to have a lot of Daddy's money just to meet your office expenses.
By the way, it is almost certain that Ford's brother, Doug, is going to run for Rob's seat. Is that one of the wards that can be expected to be dissolved? Somehow, I don't think it will be.
Almost all of Rob Ford's proposals are a better indication that he drinks too much than even his drunk driving arrest and his unfortunate confrontation at the Air Canada Centre in 2006 do. This guy just isn't serious, and everyone with a passing acquaintance with mathematics should already know that.
In the unlikely event that Ford gets elected and manages to enact his platform, he'll bankrupt the city of Toronto in about twenty minutes. And there is virtually no political appetite for anyone who lives outside of area code 416 to bail us out. If he does what he says that he's going to do, we're screwed.
Rob Ford's failure as a mayor will have disastrous consequences for this city's emerging conservative plurality. Just as the failure of Bush Republicanism made Nancy Pelosi speaker and Barack Obama president, a Ford catastrophe will elect a mayor and city council far to the left to the one that we have now under David Miller.
Toronto is facing ruinous challenges, mostly arising from the fact that it is populated by about three times as many people than it was designed to handle. Ford is right about that. But cutting taxes and increasing spending isn't going to address any of those problems. Instead, it will just destroy the budget in ways that I can't even comprehend, and I've given it some thought.
He will, however, ruin conservatism in this city for a least a generation, and maybe forever. Rob Ford is going to utterly discredit an otherwise fine governing philiosphy because he's nothing approaching serious about much of anything.
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