Sideshow Rob

Rob Ford: step right up!

Presumably to distract people from his mess of a city budget, Mayor Rob Ford and his brother Doug have started a campaign to lose weight. What's telling is how the campaign has thus far mixed elements of the spectacle of professional bloodsport with the aesthetic and language of the circus sideshow.

This week, the Fords staged a boxing-style weigh-in at Toronto City Hall. The mayor came in at 330 pounds. "As you all know, over the past year I've worked hard to cut the waste here at city hall," he said. "Now I'd invite all Toronto to join me in cutting a different type of waist." Ford has promised to keep a scale outside his office throughout the campaign, so he and his brother can weigh in once a week, and members of the public can come in and join him in his mission to become slightly less than 300 pounds of fun.

Everything about this screams PR stunt, and as such, it serves as a further indication of how Ford really sees his role as mayor: less a civil servant in charge of the operations of Canada's biggest city, and more a kind of ringmaster, salesman or huckster in the P.T. Barnum mode. He won the election on a platform built from slogans repeated ad nauseam. Now, as his support on city council is beginning to waver, he's resorted to a personal campaign that uses a flippant play on his use of the word "waste" (in Fordspeak, a synonym for city services used by lower income residents), and takes visual cues from the carnival weight-guessing booth, to try and distract voters and media from the train wreck that his regime is turning into.

This should make us all wary, given that the term "mark," meaning a sucker or dupe, comes from the carnival sideshow, where carnies who ran rigged games would mark anyone that fell for the bait by slapping a chalk handprint on their backs, making them easy targets for fellow cheaters.  

Rob Ford seems to believe he can sucker the people of Toronto with a carnival sideshow centered on his big gut. It makes him look like a clown -- as long as we don't fall for it.