What’s a mayor whose greatest strength is pandering supposed to do when a cute kid criticizes his agenda?

Say what you will about Ford, but he knows how to play to his base. No sooner did he win the repeal of the vehicle registration tax, for example, than he pledged to use his extra sixty bucks to buy Christmas gifts for his kids. Call it a sweet fatherly gesture or a cheap dose of pandering, but you can’t deny that it hits all the right buttons.

Call me a cynic, but when I picture a cute kid in the Ford universe, I picture her climbing up on his knee at a press conference, calling him “Uncle Mayor,” and asking why “all the bad people wanna cwowd the woads with their bikes and stweetcars.” It’s in keeping, after all, with the reduced and superficial level of discourse that Ford and his people have dragged into City Hall. Or it would be, if nobody objected to Ford tossing out a bunch of racial slurs and “fudge” words in front of that child.

So what happens when a ten-year-old kid writes a letter to the editor of the Toronto Star in which she rather neatly skewers Ford’s public transit agenda – like Halina Katz of Toronto did this weekend? What’s a guy like Ford supposed to do about that?

Ignoring it would seem to be the most sensible approach, and as far as I’m aware, it’s the route he’s taken so far. What else is he supposed to do? Engage a ten-year-old kid in a public transit debate? Run the risk of the kid arguing him into a corner? I’m not one of these people who thinks that our mayor could be outwitted by a fifth grader, but with all due respect, I don’t think his subway plan can stand up to very much scrutiny.

I know it’s early days, and the optimist in me wants to believe that Ford just hasn’t had the chance to prove himself yet. But I’d feel a lot better about his chances if I couldn’t clearly picture him somewhere, behind closed doors at this very moment, calling poor Halina Katz a little punk.

Hell, I’d be happy to know that the closed door in question wasn’t the locked door to his office that he couldn’t open from the inside on his own, forcing a City Hall staffer to come and let him out. But as I’ve already noted, it’s immature and unfair of me to keep on bringing that up.

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