[Senator Clay Davis]

Rob Ford, Political Genius?

Ford has taken exactly such a leap in our understanding of scandal. He has taken a simple, ingenious plan for dealing with personal collapse in public office. Pretend it doesn't exist. On Friday, he was seen having his flu shot. On Monday, he sat out in the lobby signing bobblehead dolls. Today, as the city councillors each took two minutes to state how despicable they found him, he did paperwork at his desk. "I really f----ed up, that's it," he told the august body when it came time for him to speak. His methodology of defence is so simple as to be genius. All the crack smoking and, I guess, from the latest report the hookers were "in the past." Faulkner said that the past is not dead, that the past isn't even past, but for Ford everything that has happened is over. He has discovered an amazing semantic trick: everything that can be described is technically "the past." We all have a "past." Therefore he is like everybody else.

Let us examine recent scandals in the light of this new approach. How would Rob Ford have played the Eliot Spitzer scandal? Instead of humiliating his wife by bringing her out to apologize in front of the world, instead of bowing down to the powers that be, and lying low until he could begin his comeback, he should have defiantly said, "yes, I slept with a hooker. But that was in the past. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a state to run." Every time somebody brought up that he had paid for sex, he should just have pointed out that it happened in the past. Spitzer did the "classy" thing, the "responsible" thing by resigning. The result? Years later, he couldn't even get the job as comptroller. Ford will most likely be reelected in a year. Remember that his current 40% approval rating is now, at his low point. He has a year to raise it back up.

Rob Ford has not thought through what he's been doing, of course; he has stumbled on this new approach to scandal the way Marie Curie discovered radium. Call it intuition. Call it an accident. Call it whatever you like. He has understood, in some profound way, that the combination of deep cynicism about politics, the advent of reality television and a general sense of alienation from institutional life has made outright defiance a viable option. It's a whole new play: You just say "#### em" and keep on going. It actually seems to work. This discovery is a huge achievement for Ford. He should celebrate. He should throw himself a party. Just not like the ones that were in the past.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/news/ro...litical-genius