Rob ‘Rasputin’ Ford surviving smears of the left

The Toronto left’s knickers are in one bunched twist and their late leader Jack Layton’s no longer there to come to the rescue.

No matter what they do to him--and what they’ve done and are still doing would fill a rack of super market tabloids--Mayor Rob Ford keeps bouncing back. Even in the treacherous world of city hall politics where most dastardly deeds go by without notice because of the apathy that saddles municipal politics, Ford still wears the Mayoral Chain of Office. When it comes to survival, he’s a kind of Rasputin. Ford, who has emerged relatively unscathed in a soap opera gone viral on the Internet, has a current Forum poll approval rating of 42%--down a mere two points after all the drama over an alleged video supposedly showing him smoking crack cocaine presented by Somalian drug dealers to an all too willing Gawker.com and the on-an-anti-Ford- tear Toronto Star as truth.

---

The far left in Toronto, which never gives up, is up against a mayor who never gives up. If I were Rob Ford I wouldn’t sample anything from the Toronto City Hall cafeteria without a food taster. “Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps they’re not. Perhaps it is all just wishful thinking by my left-wing media colleagues and the vocal public teat-suckers who will not rest, I’m convinced, until they force the mayor out on a stretcher,” Toronto Sun columnist Sue-Ann Levy writes today. Hold that stretcher and make it the future stretchers of Ford’s enemies when they realize how far behind Father Time has really left them. What did Ford ever do to gather such visceral hatred? It’s not because he’s the fat and sweaty bull in a china shop as the Globe & Mail, Canada’s leading business voice would have it. This is how Stephen Marché, described as a novelist and the culture columnist, wrote about Ford in the Globe (Oct. 31, 2010):

"The mounds of fat that encircle Rob Ford's body like great deflated tires of defeat are truly unprecedented in Canadian politics." "Neither intelligent nor sympathetic, Mr. Ford offers voters fat. And we want fat. In fat, we see ourselves." "Let no one confuse Rob Ford's obesity with jollity. Every extra pound on Mr. Ford's frame is an extra pound of rage. His angry fat is perfectly of our time." "Mr. Ford doesn't run from his fat or hide it - and why should he? . His fat is all he has going for him; it makes him look working-class even though he's a drunk-driving, second-generation political dilettante, a man who has never been faced with the financial difficulties of ordinary people. Mr. Ford's body reflects the decline around us better than any story he could tell."

Like people most everywhere else, the people of Toronto don’t automatically buy into media smears. Why Ford is hated by the left has much more to do with how he rode the vote count to become the first ‘non-left’, small ‘c’ mayor of Toronto in living memory with 383,500 votes or 47& of the popular vote, an Oct. 25, 2010 outcome in which the left could not drown their sorrows or smoke their bitterness away. And years before that, Ford and colleague Doug Holyday, as councillors kept public heat on one of the most expensive councils in all of North America as two of that august body’s lowest spenders. (Toronto City Councillors are currently paid $102,608 a year--not counting perks and benefits). Toronto City Council, where political party identification is supposedly a non-factor, is virtually owned by the left. They and their crazy cousins over at the Toronto Board of Education managed--until the last election--to keep the beautiful city of Toronto in a socialist stupor. But the snorting stampede members out to destroy Rob Ford are about to hit a huge bump in the road much bigger than the corpulent Rob Ford. The huge bump so hard for them to swallow is that Toronto no longer belongs to the far left through the New Democrat Party (NDP). Leader Jack Layton, afforded a state funeral back in August 2011, is long gone. Toronto is not going to vote in MP Olivia Chow just on the basis she is Mrs. Jack Layton waiting in the wings. The Big Dream of the left for Canada’s largest city never really materialized. And with Liberal leader Justin Trudeau destined to steal their diminishing thunder, the NDP isn’t doing so well at the federal level either. Former Manitoba Communist leader Councillor Paula Fletcher, who rode to election on Layton’s coattails back in 2003 has not managed to bring more Communists into council, and Adam Vaughan for all of his promise when he set out, has done zilch to raise the profile of the left on home turf. Ordinary citizens in Toronto no longer believe that the left are for the average working stiff. They are too busy trying to make a living in challenging economic times. They have come to the practical thinking of putting filled potholes above politics. The far left only runs Toronto in sleazy Gawker and Toronto Star stories. It’s not over for Mayor Rob Ford. It’s over, however for the Toronto left.