The Punches That Were Never Thrown

I wasn't planning on writing a sniping post-mortem of Rocco Rossi's mayoral campaign, despite the invitation of some people to do so. I don't personally dislike him and I thought very seriously about voting for him before he decided to run a full-bore populist campaign.

If there's one thing I truly despise in politics, it's populism. Every populist campaign in North American history has been built on one of two premises: either that the candidate is stupid, or he thinks that the voters are. Furthermore, populism is premised on the lie that life is full of simple solutions, which it isn't when all the money is gone.

I inherently distrust anyone who refuses to address the complexity of the problems that we face, which is why I would never support Rob Ford or the American Tea Party movement. It's also why I was so tough on Mr. Rossi, who is smart enough to know better. Turning Toronto into California will only give Toronto California's problems on top of the ones that we already have.

While I wanted to leave the Rossi for Mayor campaign the dignity of dying in peace, there's a fascinating article in this morning's Toronto Sun that changed my mind.

Rocco Rossi was about to throw some punches.

Had he not pulled the plug on his campaign Wednesday, Rossi was just days away from launching an aggressive TV advertising blitz that would have attacked both frontrunners for their personal and professional missteps and highlighted six of his policy planks.

Rough cuts of the ads obtained by the Toronto Sun show Rossi was going to stick to his policies and in at least one ad, cast himself as the candidate without George Smitherman’s $1 billion eHealth scandal baggage or Rob Ford’s drunken incident at the ACC and his Florida arrest and guilty plea to a DUI.

In the scathing anecdote ad, Rossi — front and centre in all the ads and surrounded by a stark, white background — recounts a tongue-in-cheek conversation he had with his mother where she apologized to him for raising him a certain way.

“We told you not to get drunk in public and get kicked out of the ACC,” Rossi says, recalling his mother’s words while a photo of Ford comes on the screen along with a quote about his infamous hockey night. “We told you not to get arrested and then lie about it.”

“And I think we probably told you not be involved in a billion-dollar scandal,” Rossi continues as a photo of Smitherman comes on the screen.

“It seems that those are the things you need to do to be a frontrunner in this campaign,” Rossi says.

He ends the ad by saying, “On Oct. 25, vote for someone you can really believe in.”

That ad would have been nothing less than suicidal and it probably would have destroyed any prospect of a future career in politics that Rocco had. The only thing that he had going for him toward the end was his reputation a good man, more concerned with policy than personalities.

An unprovoked negative barrage would have annihilated that forever. It also would have reeked of desperation, coming as it would have from a candidate that was being studiously ignored by the two frontrunners. If Team Rossi's silly and offensive "Goomba" series of adds didn't drive Rocco's numbers to below zero, going negative surely would have.

Worse than being ridiculous and pathetic, it would have been utterly ineffective. Pretty much everyone in the city already knows about George Smitherman's e-Health boondoggle and Rob Ford's propensity to humiliate himself and everyone around him at the drop of a hat. That's why a quarter of the vote in every single poll out there remains undecided with just ten days to go.

Would it have gotten Mr. Rossi all kinds of attention? Yes. Would have gotten him any votes? No. Desperation never does. If he was responding to an attack on him, going negative might have helped, although not enough to win, but throwing the first punch never swings undecideds to you. It might suppress the other guy's turnout, but that doesn't do you a lot of good when you're only at four percent. At four percent, it doesn't even fire up your base because you don't have a base.

Moreover, it would have ruined Rocco's "nice guy" image and crippled him in any future run for office. The only thing worse than winning ugly in politics is losing ugly and having that reputation is another hurdle Rossi would have to overcome.

The interesting question is who released the ads to the Sun and why? They had to have come from within the Rossi campaign, unless there's a production company out there that really wants to get sued out of existence. If I were to guess, I would say that it has a lot to do with several former staffers auditioning for jobs with the Ford campaign.

It's too bad that they couldn't have done that without tarnishing their former boss.