Advice? The unstoppable Rob Ford needs none
By Steve Burgess, Yesterday, TheTyee.ca
Spin doctor Steve’s re-election tip for Toronto’s mayor? Just be you.
[Editor’s note: Steve Burgess is an accredited spin doctor with a Ph.D in Centrifugal Rhetoric from the University of SASE, situated on the lovely campus of PO Box 7650, Cayman Islands. In this space he dispenses PR advice to politicians, the troubled and well-heeled, the wealthy and gullible.]
Dear Dr. Steve,
Just one more year until the next mayoral race in Toronto. And I’m thinking: So far, so good. I have confessed to crack smoking, my personal assistant has been charged with extortion, and I have shown up in surveillance videos pissing on the sidewalk. My poll numbers are pretty steady. As I see it I can do just about anything at this point. Am I right?
Yours,
Rob Ford
Dear Mayor Ford,
Looks that way, doesn’t it? Your devoted fans will follow you anywhere. Too bad the tag “Deadheads” is spoken for — it fits. It’s interesting to speculate about what you’d have to do to alienate your core. What’s to stop you from going full Magneto? Wreak havoc! You can always blame it on a drunken stupor later. As long as you don’t try to increase food bank funding or build any bike lanes, you’re golden.
Kudos to you, mayor. You have rewritten the rules. At the Vatican, white smoke signals a new regime. In Toronto, a big puff of crack smoke announces your re-election campaign. After your admission that the maggots of the press had indeed been correct about your recreational habits, the announcement that you would make another statement today drew a writhing mass of them to City Hall. Economists will later note a sharp drop in Canadian GDP on Nov. 5 as the nation awaited announcement of your plans. The Harper government missed a glorious opportunity that afternoon — they could have stuffed Senator Mike Duffy into the trunk of a Lincoln and driven him away with not a single camera around to record the event.
If media attention is currency, Mr. Mayor, you were the equivalent of six Koch brothers today. Somewhere in the city Toronto Argonauts general manager Jim Barker must have been staring at the TV in envy, contemplating whether he should start smoking crack. He can only dream of such coverage. But then, when it comes to CFL football the West is best, whereas in the Canadian Mayoral League it’s East Division season ticket holders who see all the action.
It was rumoured you’d announce you were taking a leave. That turned out to be a misunderstanding — perhaps you told somebody you were taking Aleve. I’m sure those hangovers of yours are wicked. But when you finally stepped before the cameras all you did was apologize, promise not to smoke any more crack (no promises about future pissing on the sidewalk), and close by saying “God bless the city of Toronto.”
In weeks to come Hogtown is bound to see the influence of your bold approach. One will now be able to drag race through a school zone or drive over the neighbour’s dog, emerging from the vehicle just long enough to declare, “God bless the city of Toronto,” and drive on.
Torontonians claim to be embarrassed by all this. Well, some Torontonians. Others are quite honest about popping big bowls of popcorn every time another “Breaking News” banner appears. (One of the more pathetic sidelines of this whole business has been the secret pride we Canadians have taken in becoming the lead joke on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.)
But the genuinely embarrassing part has been electoral. We don’t know yet what will happen next year but the astounding truth, Mayor Ford, is that you do indeed seem to have a legitimate shot at re-election. Once upon a time Canadians could act properly appalled at the American success of the Tea Party, and before that of George Dubya. Hard to do that now. A politician like you holds up a mirror to the electorate. That’s why not everyone is laughing.
One of the great political lessons of this affair is that politicians can lower the bar not just for future candidates, but for themselves. By engaging in increasingly outrageous behaviour, you blot out the memory of your own past outrages. You allegedly groped a woman at a party, flipped the bird to a citizen in traffic, commanded a TTC bus be emptied to ferry your high school football squad, were charged with conflict of interest (though those were later dropped), denied charges brought against you in Florida, spewed obscenities to fans at a Leafs game and later denied you were ever there, called 911 on a comedian, and a reporter, etc.
But people can’t focus on all that. The sheer volume works in your favour. All you have to do is keep topping yourself. Now it’s all about the crack thing. The fact that reporters laughed when you said “God bless the city of Toronto” is enough for you to launch your counter-attack against those cynical big city elitists. And away we go.
I’ve got to hand it to you Rob — you’ve changed my thinking. I used to favour an elected Senate. Now I figure if we leave it up to the voters, we’ll never get rid of these clowns.
Cartoon by Greg Perry.
Related story:
Rob Ford crack scandal: What’s behind mayor’s ‘mind-boggling’ PR strategy?
By Andre Mayer, From CBC News
Pure chaos? Or a “brilliant” strategy to win back public sympathy and keep his job as Toronto’s mayor?
Whichever the case, it was a wild day at city hall Tuesday — followed avidly in updated headlines around the world — as Mayor Rob Ford broke with months of denials to finally admit “I have smoked crack cocaine.”
It was an admission that was totally at odds with the past six months and seemed to catch close advisers off guard — even, perhaps, his brother Coun. Doug Ford, who had only that morning embarked on an aggressive round of talk show appearances designed to shore up the party line.
The Rob Ford Story
If there was a plan here, “it just continues to be one of the most unconventional and mind-boggling communications strategies that I’ve ever seen in my life,” says Bill Walker, general manager of the PR firm Fleishman-Hillard’s Toronto office.
“I don’t know how in one day you go from your brother demanding that the police chief resign, to you admitting that you smoked crack cocaine, and you calling a press conference where everybody thought you were going to resign and then, instead, announcing that you are going to run again in the next election for mayor — and you’re not leaving.
“It just indicates complete chaos to me.”
On the other hand, by finally stepping up and taking responsibility for his actions, Ford has performed “the final mea culpa,” says Patrick Gossage, a former press secretary to prime minister Pierre Trudeau. “It’s brilliant.”
FordCrackAdmission
Gossage agrees there has been no rhyme or reason to the mayor’s PR strategy, nor has there been since reports first emerged in May that there was video evidence of Ford smoking crack.
“I know two [PR] firms that have been in and out of the mayor’s office, and there’s nothing you can tell him – nothing,” says Gossage.
Still, he feels that Ford’s confession is at least a partially calculated move to ingratiate himself with Toronto voters for the 2014 election after months of rumour and speculation about his drug use. And that it is a tactic that has been successful in the past.
In 2001, the late Alberta premier Ralph Klein made a public confession of his problem with alcohol and pledged to quit drinking after he was seen stumbling drunk into a homeless shelter and berating a homeless man.
Arguably the most famous political precedent is that of former Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry, who was caught in a police sting smoking crack in 1990. Barry blamed police for targeting him but ended up serving six months in prison. In 1995, he was re-elected mayor for his fourth term with 47 per cent of the popular vote, and still sits on council.
Gossage says that Rob Ford might actually be able to take a valuable lesson from Barry’s experience.
Barry’s re-election slogan was ‘I’m not perfect, but I’m perfect for D.C.,’ Gossage observes. “I’ll bet you Ford steals it.”
‘The wildest, longest pursuit I can recall’
Ford’s unexpected announcements Tuesday follow almost six months of heated language in the media over the existence of a video showing the mayor smoking crack cocaine.
During his news conference, Ford said that “I feel like a thousand pounds have been lifted off of my shoulders,” and that “the past is the past and we must move forward.”
Mark Sherwin, president of Toronto-based crisis management firm CorpWorld, says that while the confession was a long time coming, it should ultimately benefit Ford politically as it tends to make him seem more human.
“The fact that someone confesses, that someone says, ‘Yes, I did this’ or ‘I was involved in this and I regret it,’ that is better than somebody being caught in the act,” says Sherwin.
But while he applauds Ford for finally unburdening himself, Sherwin also says the mayor did great damage to his image by not confessing sooner.
When the Toronto Star and U.S. gossip site Gawker.com first reported in May on a video showing Ford smoking a crack pipe, the mayor repeatedly and vociferously denied both using crack and the existence of the video.
Outside his Etobicoke home on May 17, Ford called the media reports “ridiculous” and “absolutely not true.” More than a week passed before he gave any real comment, sending out his brother Doug to hold down the fort.
On May 24, Ford gave his now famous press conference. “I do not use crack cocaine,” he said. “Nor am I an addict of crack cocaine.” Furthermore, he refused to comment on a video he said he had “never seen or does not exist.”
The messaging remained consistent right up until Monday morning when he told a sympathetic radio host that “I can assure you … I do not use drugs, I drink.”
In late August, Ford admitted to smoking “a lot” of marijuana in the past, and on his Sunday radio show this past weekend he apologized for getting “hammered” on two public occasions, and promised not to do that again.
“That was pure stupidity,” he said Sunday. “I just got to maybe slow down on my drinking.” But he still wouldn’t comment on a “video that I have not seen.”
The mayor’s staunch denials heightened public interest and exacerbated the scandal, Sherwin says.
“[Ford] set himself up for the wildest, longest pursuit I can recall, until he finally did confess.
“We always recommend to our clients, if something has gone wrong, if something has happened, admit it and move on,” says Sherwin. “But the longer the pursuit goes, the worse it is for the individual involved.”
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