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A campaign joke: What’s the difference between a Russian hacker and NHL commissioner Gary Bettman?

None. They both sit on their butts and try to influence foreign elections.

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The Russians seem pretty good at this. Bettman, however, is awful. His attack on Mayor Naheed Nenshi may have tipped the civic campaign toward the incumbent mayor.

“Not the stupidest political move I’ve ever seen, but pretty close,” says Marc Henry, who once managed issues for ex-Mayor Dave Bronconnier, and is now a pollster with ThinkHQ.

Nenshi campaign adviser Chima Nkemdirim reports “a lot of supportive calls and emails. And we ran out of lawn signs this morning.”

A surge for Nenshi wouldn’t be surprising. The reaction to Bettman’s intervention was widely hostile.

Bettman said, remarkably, that Nenshi doesn’t think the Flames matter to Calgary.

“We were having a theoretical conversation about the importance of arenas and major league sports franchises to a city, which he indicated he didn’t believe in,” Bettman told Postmedia’s Eric Francis from his office in New York.