As I generally do...sharing the piece I posted at 5 a.m (stayed up all night finishing it!!! :) ) again for anyone who may have missed it! Due I suspect to the highly defensive and extremely empty partisan nature of some commentary these days where any criticism is verboten and where the party or politician one backs cannot possibly be wrong about anything, I have seen that a relatively small group of partisan folks have entirely missed the point of the piece...and it is a piece that is FAR more critical of Chows opponents than it is of Chow. The point is...if you really want to Chow to win, perhaps it is time to admit the obvious...the campaign is NOT going well at the moment and this has actually something to do with the strategy itself and not its critics. No amount of the uncritical, cheer-leading nonsense that passes for supporting a candidate these days will change that. There is still time...just not much of it. Mirroring the fate of Barbara Hall in 2003, polls indicate Olivia Chows campaign would appear to have gone from sure thing to on track to be a political footnote. Should this prove to be true it will have been for oddly similar reasons. Meanwhile, two right-wingers, including our present mayor with a pronounced and self-admitted record of criminal, racist, misogynist and homophobic behaviour, are shaping up to contest the throne in what will amount to a showdown between mainstream conservatism and austerity, and its populist, and I think we can now safely say, borderline neo-fascist wing. Like Hall, this campaign was Chows to lose. And like Hall, she has played it safe as a strategy to stay on top. Well ahead in the polls, with very high name-recognition and a ready base of supporters in a city that has overwhelmingly favoured the NDP and Liberals electorally recently historically, including in its suburbs and including in the recent provincial election, she would have appeared an obvious candidate to carry that same vote against a tired conservative political figure with a proven track record of failure and a bigot whose astonishing behaviour while in office is a lesson in how the rich, the white and the male are treated differently. And yet her substantial lead has evaporated. She now sits in third place behind both Tory and Ford. Given that she began the campaign by framing herself as the sole strategic option that would stop Ford, and that she is now clearly not that option, Chow has little choice but to attempt a dramatic shift in tone and approach.
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 02:35:34 +0000
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