If you’re looking for a summary of all the blunders Mayor Mel Lastman has made over the years go no further than his official website, mellastman.com. There you’ll see him warmly shaking hands with a Hell’s Angels thug. You’ll see some of the native Kenyans Mel worried might eat him when he travelled to Mombassa to promote Toronto’s Olympic bid. You’ll see the tanks that rolled through our streets back in ‘99, the ones Mel called in to protect us—from the snow. His bio even mentions that his wife got nabbed for shoplifting. Honest.
If at first it seems strange that he would proudly—and it is proudly, check it out for yourself—display these unseemly moments from his public life, after a consideration of exactly what it is that’s appealing about Lastman, it makes perfect sense. Lastman epitomizes what only a very lucky or very adept politician can: the common man.
Lastman has been successful for so long because he seems like a guy from the block. He works hard, he listens to what regular folks tell him, and yes, he screws up every now and again. And again. Lastman has proven that when a politician does something stupid we can forgive him, even be endeared to him, if he is truly contrite. And Mel does contrition like no other. Better an honest leader whose knowledge of Africa comes from Looney Toons than one who is slick enough to manipulate us.
Notably absent from Lastman’s website bio are the MFP computer contract scandal and, of course, that darn paternity suit thing. The reason for the omissions is at once obvious: they don’t jibe with his image as the working class kid from Kensington who made good in the furniture business before charming his way into the mayorship of Canada’s biggest city. And it’s because of these slip-ups, particularly the procurement scandal, that public opinion has turned against Lastman. It’s as if the people of Ontario have said ‘you can fuck up in front of a mic, you can even fuck around on your wife, but don’t you dare fuck with our money!’
While Lastman has over the years played the Regular Joe role with the ease that comes with actually being one, others’ use of it is more calculating. Take Mike Harris and the provincial Tories of the nineties. True, Harris, a university drop-out and ex-golf-pro is not exactly an aristocrat, but it is clear that his and his party’s image, their “Common Sense,” was part of a well-planned package marketed to Ontarians. And we bought it. As we came to learn, however, and as current Premier Ernie Eves is learning while backtracking one-by-one on his predecessor’s policies, it wasn’t so much common sense they were pushing as it was crude utilitarianism, scapegoating and blind faith in privatization.
Which brings us to Dubya. The gutsy, no-guff gunslinger. Not since the sixties, when they were enamoured by tales of Lyndon Johnson’s penchant for profanity and habit of chatting with White House guests while sitting on the toilet, have Americans been led by someone so in touch with middle America. As it has with Lastman and Harris, the common man image gives Bush a certain leeway with the public—they trust him because he’s one of them. No matter that he’d rather help out big oil than protect the environment. No matter that he wants to cut taxes for multi-millionaire heirs and those who play the stock market while making it harder for regular families to get such government assistance as tax credits and school lunches.
What the American people see in their straight-talking Commander in Chief is a man who refuses to apologize for being American, who will stand up for them on a world stage crowded with Islamic terrorists, pompous Frenchman and ungrateful Germans. In an era in which Americans have felt that their values, not to mention their lives, have been under attack, this image has been key to his popularity.
But as the deficit soars and the economy sags, as his administration continues a war in Afghanistan, starts another in Iraq and sets its sights on North Korea, and as the wounded Democrats regroup for 2004, the American People show signs of looking beyond Dubya’s image. CBS / New York Times polls show that Bush’s approval ratings have been decreasing steadily since they peaked just after September 11. As Harris and Lastman know, the common man shtick can only take you so far.
