All right, let’s do the obligatory “Mayor Ford” post

What a difference a day makes! “I can’t picture any of the candidates earning more than fifty percent of the vote,” I said yesterday, “and I really don’t want to picture it, because I think the only one who could possibly do it is Ford.”

Well, although he ultimately seems to have fallen just short of the fifty percent mark credited to him by some of the early returns, Ford has achieved an astonishing victory. In fact, he won the election by such a substantial amount that the “strategic vote” debate was essentially rendered moot; even if every last Pantalone voter had backed Smitherman, he would have won by less than a percentage point.

Obviously, I don’t think any of this is good news. Indeed, if you’re looking for a symbol of the depths to which the city could sink under Ford, you don’t have to look much further than the fact that Mike Harris crawled out of his cave to attend his victory party.

That said, this was a democratic vote. As much as we may have liked to believe that the polls were somehow inaccurate, you can’t deny the fact that Ford’s victory represents the will of a great many Torontonians – or at the very least, the Torontonians who voted – to adopt a shift to the right.

We can question it, complain about it, and wish it weren’t so, but that’s the reality of the situation. More importantly, it’s the reality of the city we’ll be living in from December onward. The question before us is how we adopt our goals, conversations and organization to the new political climate.

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