LORINC: Ford bobbles the media

Mayor Rob Ford is a politician who deals in pure, uncut intuition.

After that entertaining little sideshow yesterday about his branded swag, what could be clearer?

For much of Tuesday’s news cycle, the press corps obediently provided our crack-smoking, dissembling chief magistrate with the kind of publicity you just can’t buy. For months, the narrative arc of the Ford story was dominated by scenes of flight and pursuit — the mayor as literal and figurative fugitive, fleeing the police and the press or some combination thereof.

But in the aftermath of an almost unimaginably humiliating week, he pulls off what could only be described as a public relations coup by hiding in plain view.

The post-crack-confession narrative is all about (engineered) transparency, self-deprecating humour, and cheerful partisanship, topped up with a gram or two of selfless civic concern (the little coda about relief efforts for Philippines just before the evening newscasts) to, well, help us all forget and forgive. The fugitive is not only accessible to the grinning vultures in the media; he’ll autograph the souvenirs they like to keep on their desks. It takes a big man, and all that.

And we all fell for it.

Consequently, Ford enters council today on the offensive. Yes, he’s going to be the subject of Denzil Minnan-Wong’s toothless censure motion. But for voters who tuned in to the easy-breezy bobble head storyline (they’re selling for hundreds on eBay, don’t you know!), Ford will emerge, once again, as a kind of bearlike bullying victim — conspicuously contrite, out there, and now facing the politically-motivated prigs on council who only want to get in their kicks for the cable access viewers at home and potential donors.

My prediction: He’ll use his mayoral prerogative to position himself in front of the motion early on — rising to speak, hanging his head, repeating last week’s apology, talking about going to the gym, and then getting back on the message track.

Et voila, problem solved. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was all over by noon.

Here, I think, is what Ford intuits about how this scandal is playing out: The editorial writers can’t continue to pen vein-popping screeds indefinitely. The crack video may air, but he’s admitted everything so there’s no more shock value there. Jon Stewart will move on to other material, and the international TV crews will go off in search of other salacious stories with global import. The storm will pass. The governance crisis, however, will remain, even if the circus has left town. Maybe, as Gord Perks has argued on Twitter and in the Huffington Post, politicians shouldn’t be in the business of passing judgment on their peers. That’s the responsibility our society has assigned to the voting public.

I’m not convinced. True, pushing the provincial government to pass recall legislation is not the best way to go; such laws merely stoke the moneyed populism that has created gridlock and perma-campaigns in many U.S. jurisdictions.

What about the existing legal framework? The City of Toronto Act has provisions that require politicians to leave office if they have a criminal conviction or fail to show up for council for a sufficient period of time. Are those sanctions sufficient? Ford hasn’t been convicted of anything. But if the truancy provision is a kind of litmus test for a municipal politician’s attitude towards the office, Ford’s admitted transgressions are inarguably more serious than truancy.

So anticipating the anti-climax that will be today’s vote, our attention must turn in the direction of John Filion’s notice of motion, which goes somewhat further in stripping the mayor of his powers to set council’s agenda and determine its political make-up. In my view, the motion should go further, and severely curb the mayor’s office budget so he can’t use the city’s resources to campaign for re-election.

But to take these steps, the councillors need to have the courage of their convictions. They all signed on to the code of conduct. They’ve all told him to step away. They’ve all decried the dishonour that he’s brought to the Office of the Mayor.

If or when this “spectacle,” to quote journalist Stephen Marche’s spot-on description of last week’s events, dissipates, our local representatives must choose to act, not to enable. Punting this one to the voters is just passing the bobblehead.

photo courtesy Winnipeg Free Press