Rob Ford: the Great Communicator

His inability to conduct CBC interviews without sounding like a disoriented gym teacher aside, Toronto's mayor-elect has a lot to teach us about getting a message across.

If there is a moral to Rob Ford’s victory, writes the National Post’s Jeff Jedras, it is this: simple works. “He had a simple, clear, and compelling message — cut waste, end the gravy train — and he repeated it ad nauseum, never veering. It’s a message that resonates.” Governance isn’t as simple as that of course, but “by and large the average voter doesn’t have the time or attention span for those debates. So a simple, compelling message, even if it’s hollow, still rings true.” The federal Liberals seem to have taken this message to heart, says Jedras, and recently switched their nuanced stance on the government’s F-35 purchase to a simpler, less realistic promise to cancel their procurement altogether. Here’s looking forward to a new era of politics in which we understand everything our politicians say, and none of it relates to reality.

Ford’s victory is also instructive on the sorry state of Canadian media, according to the Toronto Sun’s Lorrie Goldstein. “With every election these days, the media bar gets lowered on what you can say about politicians,” he complains, pointing to two infamous columns in the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star that paid particular attention to Ford’s fat. Goldstein makes a good point, which is proven again today by a column about Ford in the Ottawa Citizen that is offensive on many levels, but mostly on the grounds that it is not funny. So, says the Sun columnist, no more low blows against Ford please. Presumably those are best reserved for women, liberals, unions, and people whose names can be made to sound like an erection.

Sun Media’s newly minted newspaper columnist Warren Kinsella reports on the irrelevancy of newspaper columnists, at least when trying to influence elections. The Star, Toronto’s biggest paper, endorsed George Smitherman and threw all it had against Ford, and the major papers in Winnipeg and Calgary both recently backed losing candidates. Only the Sun endorsed a winner in all three cities, Kinsella boasts.

Does this mean we can now refer to the Sun as the paper of the ruling elite?