Rob Ford, again
Apr. 24th, 2013 12:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidgeThe last few weeks, culminating in yesterday's Executive Committee meeting, suggest that Ford has completely abandoned trying to govern and is trying to stake out strong positions on topics where he will go down in flames before Council -- the Casino, the Airport extension, no transit funding -- and will then use to define himself in the next Election.
The only problem is that these are topics which I expect the centre-left would love him to run on. If he runs (or can be positioned as running) as someone who wants to turn Toronto into an Atlantic City with extra gridlock and jets whizzing by overhead, that looks to me like running with a large target painted on his back. These may play to his core supporters, but these issues (the Casino and Transit funding in particular) are not ones which play well to the suburban/urban split he has based his image on (the airport does pit downtown against the suburbs in the sense that Downtown cares about it, but the petit-bourgeois suburban voters who are his core supporters are not generally the otherwise conservative business types who fly regularly out of Porter (who are better represented by the Board of Trade, which he ignored yesterday) and probably don't care very much about it.
The only problem is that these are topics which I expect the centre-left would love him to run on. If he runs (or can be positioned as running) as someone who wants to turn Toronto into an Atlantic City with extra gridlock and jets whizzing by overhead, that looks to me like running with a large target painted on his back. These may play to his core supporters, but these issues (the Casino and Transit funding in particular) are not ones which play well to the suburban/urban split he has based his image on (the airport does pit downtown against the suburbs in the sense that Downtown cares about it, but the petit-bourgeois suburban voters who are his core supporters are not generally the otherwise conservative business types who fly regularly out of Porter (who are better represented by the Board of Trade, which he ignored yesterday) and probably don't care very much about it.
