babble is rabble.ca's discussion board but it's much more than that: it's an online community for folks who just won't shut up. It's a place to tell each other — and the world — what's up with our work and campaigns.
Support rabble | Advertise with us | Contact our staff | About rabble | Log-in or Register for a new account | Corrections | Privacy policy | Newsfeeds | Mailing lists
rabble: Features | Columnists | In Cahoots | Blogs | Books | Photos | What's Up | Polls
babble: Forum Topics | Active Topics
The rpn: About the RPN | Become a podcaster
rabbleTV: Program Guide | Features | Indie Inside | Best of the net
Copyright © 2001-2013 the authors
Syndicate
And if POC did vote for Ford, I'd rather not get into why but say it's not only for his economic message. eta: like many of the white voters.
When I read the Eye article and look at the results, one thing is clear: regardless of how the numbers add up, the progressive side failed to get the voting public behind its agenda and ultimately bears responsibility. Yes, it's tough to mobilize people, especially when the people who need to be mobilized are those who feel they have the least stake in the system, and yes, the media is not sympathetic to anyone who tries to shake things up, but it can be done, and it must be done. You can look at Calgary where McIvor was the front-runner for a long time, and only in the last little while did Higgins emerge as the "anybody but" candidate, but it was an unknown Muslim business professor who was able to take the city by surprise and win. Perhaps if the elections weren't so close some of the lessons could have been applied, things could have gone differently.
What really pisses me off is that this all seems to be a game to the backroom political hacks who run these campaigns (into the ground) and often we see how the campaigns are failing, we know how the campaigns can be more effective, yet our voices are not heard, and we are the ones who have to suffer from the kinds of policies the Rob Fords of the world would impose on us.
I don't think there are too many "yuppies" in Rob Ford's ward. But I'm not so convined he has this huge base of support among the "lumpenproletariat" of the City.
Rob Ford won because people were pissed off at the Garbage strike. In the garbage strike the Union left the workers to rote in the sun along with the uncollected garbage.
Also they rememeber that TTC strike and where was the Union on that one? Same thing as the garbage strike, selling out the workers.
People got pissed off as they watched unionized workers getting a pay raise and themselves looking for a job going broke.
The working class lost it's weak voice in Toronto politics a long time ago.
Everytime the workers get sold out by their Unions and NDP politicians, right winged reactionary simpltons gain more control.
ill tell you how it is.. When an auto parts plant goes on strike, the entire working force of Ontario goes on strike. When the government is cutting back welfare money, everyworker takes a few days off.
They close a pool and put our kids out, we shut the province down until that pool is reopened.
Until that happens, you better start coming to terms with people like Rob Ford.
I suspect that both the Ford win and the Nenshi win both have "change" and agressive grass roots marketing at the heart of their succcess. As little as 10% of the voting population in a municpal election where less than 50% of voters vote can be decisive. Under such circumstance motivating groups that are unmotivated normally to vote can be a winning strategy.
Rock promoter styles. Barnum and Bailey logic.
The left had best not understimate the importance of local business leadership in immigrant communities. Neither they, nor the people who work with them and for them have much sympathy for the traditional left union movement that appears just like more of the establishment to them. The economics of breaking into the lucrative public sector job market is not lost on them, and privitization is certainly one way to open that can.
That 70% becomes 35% in the context of voter turnout. I didn't say that no POC or working class voted for him. I am suggesting that they are a small minority the majority of his support probably came from entitled middle class urban and suburban voters.
As for a mandate it isn't a matter of comparisons to Miller or anyone else. What kind of democracy is it that a minority of voters is considered a "strong" mandate. Maybe it's just me but I always thought that under 50% was a fail. Cueball saying that he has a mandate because of Smitherman voters doesn't ring true either people didn't really vote for Smitherman's agenda not even those who thought he was the best candidate.
The ability of either Ford or Smitherman to put forward a right wing agenda is through the votes of the right wing liberals. The dyed in the wool conservatives are a minority on council anything scary about the Ford agenda was not that different from Smitherman and will depend on the same councillors to pass it.
The mandate exists because it will set the tone for how councilors will vote. Looking forward they can expect the same dynamics in the next election if they seek re-election. Their performance will be based on the votes in play, whatever percentage of the electorate is engaged in the process. The mandate is functional not because Smitherman's voters necessarily support the end of collective bargaining rights for garbage collectors, but because they are unwilling to defend it. It doesn't really effect them. Garbage strikes are annoying they think. These progressive voters are soft on these issues.
As for non-voters we can only hypothesize about what they support, and we can make some judgments, but at the end of the day, defending collective bargaining rights for garbage collectors is not enough to get them to the polls. So again, it doesn't really effect them and they are unwilling to defend it on principle and garbage strikes are annoying. These non-votes are not even in play.
Theoretically we can say the mandate does not exist, but in practice it has arrived.
Hey cue, how come Chantal Hebert did not know that the NDP were not supporting Pantalone, as you claim?
Because I was there, and she most definitely was not. Maybe some people should have considered the optics of Pantalone's defeat and how some some ivory tower political analysts would interpret the results of the NDP's underwhelming efforts here.
I am sorry Remind, I did a lot of work here in Trinity Spadina, and over the entire period I did not meet on single volunteer from the riding who ward from the NDP who was working directly on Joe's campaign. Weather that was intentional as some say, or just bad organization, that is the fact.
It's no big deal. We will just have to take charge of things ourselves from now on.
It's what we have to work with. Of the people who were motivated to vote, this is what they decided they wanted. As I said earlier, the fact that almost half the city did not vote speaks to the fact that progressives failed to motivate that half to vote for them. Progressives clearly lost this one, any attempt to blame "the system" or lament the fact that more people didn't show up is irrelevant. Where do you go from here?
Actually having more than half the population turn out to vote is someting of a victory, imo. It certainly speaks to the idea that people are attempting to engage and take control of the process. That is what I take from Ford's numbers. Also, seeing the new immigrant communities becoming more involved is pretty exciting.
Isn't that funny, since on election night there was a joint "victory party" for Mike Layton and Joe Pantalone and it was full of NDP organizers and Jack and Olivia etc... and there were all yukking it up with Pantalone and raising their arms in the air together. Looked like a love-in between Joe Pantalone and the local NDP to me. Since you hate Layton so much, you obviously steered clear of the local NDP campaign in ward 19 - where NDPers were busy killing two birds with one stone campaigning for Mike Layton in tandem with Joe Pantalone.
Just in case you did not realize it, I was tongue in cheek here, shoulda put a winkie up, but had to dash off line for a few mins so hurried too much.
Personally thought it was pretty damn funny that a so called well respected national political pundit, pontificating from Outremount would say such stupid damn things about Toronto's civic election, as if she knew something because she was on the ground there.
Agree with this completely, and they should be kicking themselves in the ass for not drawing a clearer distinction or giving massive support.
No need to be sorry, ever, people who work the front lines always know more than those in the backrooms, it is just too bad those in the back rooms do not understand this. Perhaps their political science degrees blind them to real people's opinions. ;)
Also agree with this absolutely, for the most part, but firmly believe the tearing down of Miller and the other left civic politicians, by those supposedly on the left, played a huge part in this situation.
Listening to whispers in the ear of the provocatuers put there to do so, has long been an issue on the left. Especially for those in Ontario it seems. ;)
Settle down.
I know you always need to get the last word - but surely you can do better than that.
I could but it would only encourage another outraged response. I have said what I said, you know what I think. Are you disappointed? The campaign is over, and its time to move on, with some lessons learned and a few victories to account for. You may not see them, but I do.
52% of the voters turned out, and that kind of engagement is a victory all by itself.
Anything to say about Hebert's analysis concerning the significance of Jack's endorsement failing to get out big numbers for Joe? Is the NDP dead? Jack Layton finished? Bad judgement on Jack's part to endorse Joe and bring the party into disrepute in the media?
For what it is worth here is my take on Ford's election as an outsider.
Ford tapped into a growing anger about how government uses tax dollars at all levels to award its friends. From eHealth, to fancy parties, to insider contracts and on and on the average citizen feels like government is playing them for chumps. For the most part the average person supports paying taxes as long as it is used for good things. But there is a growing sense that government has broken that trust and that the hard work people do to pay their taxes is not respected. Incidently this is why Smitherman's campaign was doomed from the start. No amount of preening coverage by the Star or calls for strategic voting was going to change that, in fact it re-enforced the underlying anger in many ways.
Ford was able to tap into this sentiment. Most of the people who found him attractive that are not dyed in the wool idealogues were not attracted to him because he was talking about tax cuts per se, but because he was talking about turning off the tap for perceived misuse of the trust between citizen and government. It doesn't matter how much of a percentage that misuse represents- one penny is too much for most people. In the absense of a progressive argument about stopping that abuse and not just focusing on the scandal of the moment, but getting at the underlying issues- people will be sucked into the anti-tax and tax cutting message.
Missing this message and talking about how low taxes are by comparision, or how we need to protect services and so on is never going to get through without attaching it to this underlying sense that government is not working in our best intererts, but rather the best interests of friends and insiders - the elite if you will. Defenidng the status quo is a route to being irrelevant. Anger is growing- we on the left can either try to direct it in positive ways or we can get run over in the stampede. Our choice.
On another note - Cueball I am impressed with the work and dedication you showed in working in this election. That should be respected and it shames me that it is not.
There were many others who did more than I did. Joe for example, worked tirelessly and gave up his secure position on council. Most of all Joe deserves credit for giving me a candidate that I could support. A very rare thing indeed.
Cue, you can't have it both ways, either the NDP did endorse and support Pantelone, or they didn't. This type of commentary by you is why I stated you are not consistent in your expressed political view points, which does you a great disservice.
Herbert's words, were nothing more than a smoke screen to mask the massive Liberal failure in getting their man Smitherman elected, which I noted in another thread, and they no more brought disrepute upon the NDP, than your words do. The only disrepute they brought was upon Herbert herself. People are way smart enough to see the smoke screen she tried to throw up, afterall they saw the TO Star shilling for Smitherman for what it was, and voted Ford.
But I echo BA's words to you about your hard work, it should be deeply respected, by all who are politically aware. It is true comunity service.
If you read that previous post in the context of previous discussions I have had about the Pantalone campaign with Stockholm you will see that he more or less blames defeat on Pantalone because he was a weak candidate. In that context I am asking if Jack brought embarrassment to the party by endorsing a weak (sic) candidate.
As well, Stockholm asserts that the party (and Jack) was fully behind their man. In that case Hebert's comments have at least some merit, since defeat is shared by Pantalone and the party together, and Jack as his sponsor. The organization was either incapable of running a strong campaign, or incapable of producing a talented candidate from within its ranks. Or both! So you are right, we can not have this argument both ways, your observation is correct, this is why I am asking Stockholm these questions.
Looking back in retrospect, I don't think the "left establishment" ever thought we would retake the mayor's seat in this election. Perhaps they did until Adam G pulled out leaving "second choice" Joe as the default candidate that few seemed to get very excited about. In this, David Miller (and others) may have demonstrated an error in judgement if he backed someone who just wasn't ready. How they knew it was a "lost cause", I'm not sure. Could be ongoing internal polling in the wake of the civic & TTC strikes. Could be a lack of confidence in the candidate. Could be difficulty in raising money and what looked the intention of running a strong advertising campaign (and symbolic ground campaign). Could it be the inability to build a "left-centre" coalition? Or the breakdown of candidates along party lines? Could be the prioritization of local councillor campaigns (not a bad thing in and of itself obviously) over the mayor's race. Could be that "the left" had its turn in power and that no strategy would have succeeded? More likely, a combo of all of the above and anything else I've left out.
The first time I walked into the campaign office, I got the feeling that something just wasn't right. It was Thanksgiving weekend and it was very quiet. I don't doubt that quite a few people helped the campaign or that those in the office worked their asses off. They did. But it was nothing like I remember with Miller's first campaign where there was a lot of electricity in the air, hope and constant bustle.
'Some of the signals I observed included people waiting a long time to get their law signs. Because I have a car, that's mainly how I helped out. There were still signs leftover at the end even as I had offered to put a couple dozen more on public boulevards on the final weekend but was told that they had more requests than signs and had crews coming in. Some volunteers had a challenge getting clicked in. There were no satellite offices in the suburbs. Some councillors campaign offices served as sign depots for Joe but not sure how many. There were no inside scrutineers on e-day. There were probably twice as many people at Miller's first victory party than at Joe's shared party with local candidate and victor Mike Layton. It felt more like a ward party than a city-wide campaign party (wake?). The party was about 95% white folks which may speak to some significant outreach weaknesses.
However, publicly raising doubts in the course of a campaign is wrong in my view so I just observed, helped out where I could and didn't say anything. In fact I still held out some hope that due to our quirky voting system, Miller's base and local labour/NDP "machines", that Joe could win. I was wrong and can add another notch to the Wishful Thinking Society list of unwinnable campaigns I've worked on.
But where we (Joe voters) were right was in sticking with Joe until the end and not succumbing to Liberal manipulations to position themselves as the "strategic choice" as an antedote to Ford's right wing campaign. Smitherman had nothing to offer progressives and demanded that people sell off a bit of their souls in supporting some of the despicable components of his platform. Whether Joe would have done any better in a head to head race against Ford is speculative. All Smitherman did was to legitimize many of Harris/Flaherty/Harper/Ford planks to cut taxes, services and continue the race to bottom for working people.
I totally agree that the campaign was pretty much a disaster organizationally. I don't know where that came from precisely. There didn't seem to be any experienced organizers in the middle management of the affair, and the campaign got off to a bumpy start because everyone was afraid to commit or so it seemed.
But, what I resent is the implication that there is something essentially weak about Pantalone that could not have been overcome by proper messaging, and more importantly solid work on the ground to build momentum. The campaign seemed to be about a month behind. The web site I see today is the one that should have been up a month ago, or even two months ago. But Pantalone himself was actually quite a good candidate in many ways and had ample assets that stood in stark contrast to the competition, neither of who were stellar.
Just on face value Pantalone was superior to either Ford or Smitherman, when all candidates are considered as complete packages. Surely Smitherman is a smooth talker, but scandal follows him like the plague, Ford can barely construct a complex sentence. The candidate was not inferior, but I think the messaging used to sell the candidate was wrong for the candidate in this particular race -- it was overall to much of an incumbents campaign at the start, and Pantalone only really seemed to start scoring well in debates toward the end of the campaign when he took the gloves off.
But, to repeat the most important problem was the attrocious organization of the ground campaign.
Bookish Agrarian: best post I've read. That's exactly what happened I think. Unfortunately everyone goes around blaming the media, other candidates, etc, rather than really learn some lessons.
Cueball: I agree with you that the NDP didn't come to bat for Pantalone (or the union members that largely make it up). The reason is that Joe was always a third or fourth tier candidate for them. No one, at any point, thought he could win. Rememeber when Giambrone was the great hope of the left? Then he flamed himself out. Pants was in the race, but rather than coalesce around him everyone scrambled to try to find an alternative candidate that could win. Shelley Carroll, please run, please? But the writing was on the wall that David Miller's agenda was going into the tank, and none of the first tier candidates were willing to lose their jobs to take a run at mission impossible. So Joe was left as the de facto choice. Unions and the NDP never thought he could win anyway (and Ford was now leading the race), so it made strategic sense for them to focus on council races to put together enough opposition to Ford to thwart his agenda. That's my read on things anyway.
Ha, Polunatic2. We had almost the exact same analysis...
Acknowleging Stock in anyway shape or form, about this topic, at least, is probably not a wise debating tactic, Cue. He has been completely inconsistent from the get go. But of course that is not unusual. Doing so lessens your position and gives validity to his.
Watching this from afar, I personally only viewed 3 or 4 consistent voices. The lack in consistency of opinion/consensus of course could easily be translated to the larger TO community, which is what I did. To me it means the left in TO, and by this I mean the true left, were the fuse leading to their own destruction.
The vitriol displayed here to Miller, last year, shows such a lack of emotional/political maturity that it was breathtaking.
Once you destroy a framework of the friends who really are the closest to you as possible, in this current political climate, by immature reasoning and understanding, as well as listening to the whispers of provocatuers, there is no coherent leadership, or voice. Hence inconsistent messaging and cooperation on the left. Which of course is what the corporate loving provocatuers want, and they are masters at the use of deception and division. The left just keeps on underestimating them, and eating their own friends, thinking they are smarter than those 'rednecks' on the right.
Heads up, we aren't.
One of Miller's biggest mistakes was putting any faith into Giambrone. Any good leader needs succession plan. Giambrone was the plan, and he wasn't up for it. No one else was groomed for the position.
You are entirely right about the council races. That is the heart of the complaint. Regardless there was basically no evident co-operation between the councillors the NDP were supporting and the Pantalone campaign. What I can't get my head around is that Vaughan had no competition in ward 20, and the NDP did not show up at all. And Vaughan isn't even in the NDP.
They hung him out to dry. And as Pantlone evidenced, at the end of the day, it was far more important for the left to make a stand and stick it out, than wither up when things aren't all going your way.
That Joe served for 30 years on council and several years as deputy mayor yet was not the "annointed one" is telling. He was eminently qualified. Was he the "perfect" candidate? Obviously not but once it was clear he was "our candidate", all stops should have been pulled to get him elected. There's obviously a story as to why Miller didn't advise Adam G to back Pantalone and "wait his turn". Maybe someone will write the book one day.
To me, it states by way of "telling", that there was ageism at work, as well as his not being a 'hipster' like Adam G. Plus of course the left's usual a priori self-destructing.