It is a wonderful thing to be elected for your flaws, and that is the great gift of the populist politician. Rob Ford has been busted for pot and lied about it (during an arrest for drunken driving), made racist comments and abusive remarks, sworn at a streetcar driver. He has trouble with his weight and his temper and his family: He is the common man writ large. This is the core of his appeal.

“Populist” has been defined as “appealing to the interests or prejudices of ordinary people.” On both of these fronts, Ford doesn’t disappoint.

In part, a vote for the populist politician (Ralph Klein as mayor of Calgary, then premier of Alberta; former wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura as governor of Minnesota; Sarah Palin as VP candidate) is a vote against politics itself. Especially in a political arena that is perceived to be dominated by insiders. Those who sit in taverns and complain about city hall finally get a chance to elect one of their own. And suddenly Homer Simpson is mayor.

The central conceit is that Homer will bring to city hall a refreshing honesty and a deep understanding of the average voter, two qualities that are often missing in politics.

Yet the populist rarely delivers either of these qualities. Ford is an insider, and while he may look and sound like the average voter, he shares few of their actual concerns, and none of their economic worries (his family company, DECO Labels and Tags, has estimated annual sales of $100 million).

His honesty is open to debate. When confronted with his drunken actions at a Maple Leaf game in 2006, Ford’s initial response was to emphatically lie (“This is unbelievable, I wasn’t even at the game”), as it was when confronted with his Florida pot bust (“When I say no, I mean never . . . Now I’m getting offended. No means no.”).

Ford pledged to make government more accountable and transparent, though when faced with a complaint from the integrity commissioner about using campaign funds to support a football charity, he responded by trying to eliminate her job.

Before Ralph Klein was elected mayor of Calgary in 1980, he was a portly, rumpled television reporter who decried the “sleazy developers” who were ruining his city. He entered the race with little financial backing, and his campaign manager was a 25-year-old Keg waiter. Klein won handily in what was considered less a vote for him than a vote against the political establishment.

Before his first term was finished, the city planning department was effectively dismantled, and in the words of an urban planning professor, “anyone could build anything anywhere.” Klein became precisely what the voters had voted out; he became the establishment. Yet he was re-elected with 86 per cent of the vote.

While Klein had become the establishment, he retained the look and habits of the common man. He was overweight, publicly drunk on occasion, anti-intellectual and he shot from the hip. He was resoundingly human and was loved for his flaws.

The same is true of Ford. After news of his Florida DUI charge came out, his popularity rose. Both Klein and Ford are the democratic equivalent of storming the Bastille, the triumph of the downtrodden. Though in both cases, it was a hollow victory. We get the image but not the substance.

Why are populists so successful? Maybe the issue is balance. Ford’s predecessor, David Miller, an erudite Harvard man, was perceived as a smart, largely ineffective mayor. Ford was the anti-Miller candidate, an average guy who would get things done, Ronald Reagan to Miller’s egghead Jimmy Carter.

Though Reagan was another faux populist. He campaigned on a platform of smaller government and lower taxes and less debt. But under his watch, the government expanded, taxes were raised, and the national debt swelled to a historic high. He did advance the conservative agenda on many key points, but on these fundamental pillars, he failed. Yet these facts didn’t dent his popularity, or his legacy. He did what he said he’d do — this was the resounding judgment, even though he didn’t.

Why did so many people go along with the myth? Well, myth is appealing. And Reagan was likable. His predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had magnified the complexities of governing the world’s most powerful nation, and visibly aged while in office. Reagan made it all seem simple, in part because that was how he himself grasped complex issues. He was avuncular and visibly relaxed and the electorate napped along with him.

The battle cry of the populist is: “You know where you stand with Rob/Ralph.” Except you don’t. The populist’s central policy is himself, an unknown variable, despite the rhetoric.

As Ralph Klein’s campaign manager said of their first mayoralty campaign, “We didn’t have a platform. Ralph was the platform.” This is the essence of populism, an individual triumphing over ideology, over policy, over reality even. And this isn’t always good news. The electorate identifies with them at some level, but it’s often a fraudulent level.

We live in an age where image routinely trumps truth, whether it’s sports (he didn’t take performance-enhancing drugs), or television (reality TV) or politics. It is our hunger for truth that leads to the election of the populist; his/her outspokenness is seen as a form of truth. If the delivery is unvarnished and some of the remarks unpalatable, this is seen as proof of honesty. “I admit I’m not a smooth talker, a polished speaker,” Ford said, “But a lot of people like that. As soon as you’re a smooth talker, something’s fishy.”

An MIT paper titled “A Political Theory of Populism,” defined the term as “the implementation of policies receiving support from a significant fraction of the population, but ultimately hurting the economic interests of this majority.” This is routine in South America, where populist leaders in Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador and Argentina have all loudly proclaimed their concern for the masses then quietly worked in their own interests or those of the elite.

The MIT paper concluded that “voters observe a signal rather than actual policy,” because the former is immediate and intuitive, and the latter takes time to be fully understood. But even in the face of hard evidence, we sometimes go with the image.

Our last populist mayor — the affable huckster Mel Lastman — had the requisite flaws (the two illegitimate children he denied fathering; threatening to kill then CITY-TV reporter Adam Vaughn), some memorable gaffes (the Kenyan cannibal reference), and added some comic relief (bringing in the army for that snowstorm).

Like Ford, he was not without accomplishments (notably the recycling program). Recently Lastman said he was no genius — and that is the point of the populist mayor; we don’t want a genius. But he also said that Ford makes him look like a genius. Ford is a populist among populists.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Rob Ford said he would bring common sense and integrity to city hall, though he possesses neither of these qualities in abundance. His collected quotes are a discouraging read: racist slurs (calling fellow Councillor George Mammoliti a “Gino-boy,” though Ford denied this), abusive remarks (calling Councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby “a waste of skin”), and a lightly veiled homophobia.

His drunken outburst at a Maple Leafs game in 2006 while still a councillor remains the high-water mark. When a couple asked him to be quiet, he responded with “Who the f--- do you think you are? Are you a f------ teacher . . . Do you want your little wife to go over to Iran and get raped and shot?” Added to this creepy vitriol was the addled political zinger, “Right-wing commie bastard.”

As mayor, two of his most prominent issues have been “stopping the gravy train,” and building subways. On the gravy train front, he appears, at times, to be the engineer, asking city officials to approve road repairs in front of his family business, and using political staffers as assistant football coaches.

He had success with the labour settlement and ran a surplus for 2011, but his political legacy may boil down to transit. He has ended the war on the automobile, declared war on the cyclist, and pushed any progress on public transit into an indeterminate future after killing David Miller’s 2007 Transit City initiative.

Toronto’s average commute time is now 80 minutes, last among 19 major European and North American cities. We rank ahead of Los Angeles in terms of traffic-based anger and stress. Under Ford, the car has declared war on itself.

Ford is right that people want subways. If he were to succeed in getting new ones built (many years from now), and somehow found the money to pay for them, or to quietly amortize them into the next century, who knows, he could be remembered as a visionary.

It is more likely that he’ll be the political equivalent of The Hangover. The city will wake up with a missing tooth, married to a prostitute, with a tiger roaming the streets, thinking, My god, what happened? What did we do?

When Barry was videotaped smoking crack cocaine in a hotel room with a prostitute, his response was, “Bitch set me up.” At the time he had been mayor for 11 years. When he was released from prison after serving six months, he was re-elected to city council, and in 1994, became mayor once again. You knew where you stood with Marion.

City politicians are the least political, the least professional of our elected officials, the closest thing to us. Not many people can identify with Stephen Harper, a man who exists at such a remove he’s barely there. Harper’s government is perhaps the most transformative of the last century, but Harper is the least recognizable leader since Alexander Mackenzie, John A. Macdonald’s bland successor. No one identified with Michael Ignatieff, or Stéphane Dion. But Ford is a recognizable type, an amalgam of Don Cherry and Homer Simpson and the guy in college who could open a beer bottle with his teeth.

Periodically, the average voter wants to feel someone is worrying about property taxes and potholes and safety and subway fares and where to score OxyContin, that someone is looking out for the little guy (Ford published his home number and promised to return calls). They are tired of Vision. Like the people of Whoville in Horton Hears a Who, they need to establish their existence. By electing Rob Ford or Ralph Klein or Marion Barry, the electorate is saying: We are here! We are here!

But after one term, or two (Lastman), or three (Klein), or four (Barry), even the ordinary man gets tired of seeing his reflection in a funhouse mirror.

Related: Rob Ford conflict of interest decision due next week

Don Gillmor is an award-winning journalist and author.

Read more about: