Oh yeah. Before he was elected he said tons of dumb shit.
- When cyclists get over it's their fault. For being on bicycles.
- He got into a drunken fistfight with an out-of-town couple at a Leafs game. Then denied it. Then they had video or a police report or whatever it was and he was all "Yeah okay whatever it was me."
- Busted for a pot + booze DUI in Florida
- Promised to score OxyContin for some dude who kept annoying him
- Kept getting into slander suits for opening his big mouth to various city businessmen
- A bunch of other hilarious dumb shit he said in City Council sessions (seriously, there's a ton of videos on YouTube of him saying just the most ridiculous shit or making he he was going to fight someone right there, all before he was mayor).
He was voted because the 2010 election was an utter disaster, something of a perfect political storm. This will take a little explaining:
Background: The city had just had 2 terms of David Miller a vague, well-meaning leftist who spent quite literally almost all of his two terms begging other levels of government for money to no avail. He only ever got the kissoff (no surprise), while the city continued to crumble under our massive infrastructure deficit. So people were not in the mood for another leftist (even though Miller was more like a Uselessist, but whatever).
Toronto also has a fairly sharp right/left division between downtown and the inner suburbs (the outer suburbs are other towns). So the suburbs especially wanted a low-tax right-wing dude.
The candidates who ran were awful. There were the usual raft of "No name dude and/or minor city councillor with no chance of winning", plus the following list:
- Ford
- John Tory a well-respected and generally liked moderate softly right-wing dude, but with a bad habit of getting stuck on an occasional bad idea and waffling too much (he had a disastrous tenure as the leader of the provincial conservatives)
- Sara Thompson, a semi-effective city councillor and the one with the best shot of all the no name candidates
- Rocco Rossi, a backroom operator and fundraiser for the federal Liberals, with no experience actually running for office
- George Smitherman, former a provincial Liberal minister who had held many portfolios and was deputy premier at the time of his resignation
Tory had been burned before and was hesitant about running. Then Ford's office boys pretending to be members of the public (you'll note that this is a frequent thing with Ford) left mean voicemails on Tory's answering machine, the meanies! So Tory slinked away. I mean I like the guy, but he just has no fucking spine at all, holy Christ.
Thompson never got anywhere, despite having probably the best platform and being the only candidate who did any research or bothered with facts in any way.
Rossi turned into a bizarre self-parody who tried to make jokes that he was a cartoon mafioso because he had an Italian name. The guy had quite literally no idea how to campaign. It was weird.
That left no respected candidates. Smitherman had cred, but he was a filthy fuck who (as it turned out) was responsible for every corrupt and fucked up dog-shit-mess the provincial government created for themselves (our air provincial ambulance system was turned into a ponzi scheme, we spent untold billions on a company who was supposed to create a unified electronic health records database. Only they... didn't. Plus many other things that came out later). More importantly Smitherman was and is just a complete sociopathic prick. His campaign was pretty much just "Vote for me because I deserve it". In spite of this, he became the main opposition to Ford.
Meanwhile Ford sold a very very simple mantra: Promise whatever it takes to get elected. ANYTHING.
See, most politicians lie, but they lie in that halfway lie that they can wiggle out of later. And people can see that! That's part of why politicians are so hated. But Ford promised people that a billion dollars would just fly out of his ass like so many magic farts. Only he believed it.
When people saw that he really believed it, they wanted to believe too. And so here we are.
EDIT: To be fair, Ford actually had a good rep with his constituents as a city councillor. He made a point of spending way less than his budget than anyone else on council. He always took calls and always followed up on those calls. He was a good "retail" politician - being the guy on the outside, fighting for the denizens of his little hood (this rep also came up in the election). The real problem was putting Ford in charge of anything. I mean he's dumb as a bag of hammers, but people who knew him liked him. As opposed to Smitherman, who dripped a trail of black, oily, asshole sauce everywhere he went. Even I was like "Maybe, just maybe, there's a chance that Ford'll be that rare case of the dumb idiot leader who actually happens to work out well" (uh, that doesn't mean I voted for him. God no.).
