A beautifully observed and written lesson — should they decide to listen, and they won’t — for sneering progressives who still don’t “get” the Tea Party and its still “groping around in the dark” Canadian iteration.
(And they literally won’t listen, because eye weekly seems to think that “being a snob” is a choice and not the default temperament of the smug urban sophisticates he’s addressing.
(What he’s advising is, “hey, next time, at least ACT like you care about suburbanites, m’kay?”
(And the latte sippers simply can’t. Because they don’t. Period. As we witnessed for the last six months — or ______ (insert how long you’ve been living in Toronto) — downtown hipsters HATE anyone who isn’t like them. Period. The End)
(And any candidate who CAN convincingly pretend to like people he hates is a sociopath…)
However, eye weekly leaves out one important thing, and I did too, yesterday:
What is Rob Ford most famous for?
No, not that he looks exactly like everybody’s drunk, abusive stepfather. No, not the “gravy train” line.
Rob Ford is “the guy who returns every call.”
That was always Ford’s claim to fame: that even if you didn’t living in his ward, he returned your call. If you were wrapped up in red tape and called Rob Ford, an hour or maybe a day later, the tape got snipped. The Wheeltrans showed up at your elderly mother’s door. That stupid problem you’d been screaming at bureaucrats about got taken care of.
Everyone in Toronto knows a Rob Ford story like that.
What they may not know is that, all these years, he and his brother were saving those scraps of paper — I imagine thousands of pink “While You Were Out” slips from Grand & Toy — in bankers boxes. Lots of bankers boxes.
It’s what you hipsters like to call a “data base.”
But that tactic isn’t what you’re all forgetting. It’s the “he returned everybody’s calls” part.
Rob Ford got things done.
Smitherman is a political barnacle. Worse, a dead barnacle. Like most politicians, he’ll be around forever even though he’s famously incompetent because… well, just because. Politics is like that in the US and Canada.
Smitherman’s eHealth fiasco is just his most famous screwup. Yet the smug loser has the nerve to run for mayor, and his supporters blame criticism on “homophobia” and “racism”.
(I didn’t even know his adopted kid was non-white until somebody told me yesterday. How very Angelina Jolie… )
Some of the reason Smitherman didn’t get elected, like I said yesterday, is that traditional values immigrants don’t approve of homosexuality.
But let’s all remember that Rob Ford is competent and Smiterman isn’t.
In a world where incompetence is increasingly rewarded, or at best/worst, ignored, Rob Ford’s victory left those hundreds of thousands of voters so eloquently spoken for in eye weekly feeling that, maybe, just maybe, they’d get a reward for doing the right thing, too, some day.
That, finally, the world was turning in the proper direction again.
