Rob Ford is giving his first national radio interview as mayor-elect of Canada's largest city, one day after his resounding victory.
"People are calling it a stunning win," Carol Off, the co-host of CBC's As It Happens, begins. "What do you think …"
"Things are going really well," he interjects.
"What drew so much suppo -"
"Coach!" he suddenly barks. "Half your juniors aren't even here, eh?"
The country's newest political superstar has booked his talk with a news flagship at the same time he's coaching high-school football. Folksy, perhaps, but it also makes it appear he doesn't take his new job seriously.
He feeds Ms. Off a few platitudes about cost-cutting, yells at his players some more and hangs up abruptly.
The picture is quite different the next morning when Mr. Ford strides into Talk Radio AM 640, the "home of the Leafs" and the former home of "What's eating Rob Ford?" - a weekly segment about municipal profligacy that helped propel the councillor from the inner suburb of Etobicoke to city-wide fame.
There, the mayor-elect chuckles easily with John Oakley, even as the host presses him on how he'll reduce taxes and staff without affecting services.
"It's $40-million, Johnny," Mr. Ford says lightly, referring to the revenue he'll lose if he eliminates Toronto's despised car-registration tax. "There's so many ways. Look, I'm just asking people to tighten their belts two per cent, which is really small compared to the private sector."
What's the truth in this Tale of Two Robs: Is he the scattered, inarticulate guy who blew off the CBC, or the likeable everyman who gave Mr. Oakley a sensible answer to a complex query?
That's the flummoxing thing about Toronto's new mayor. He is both his own best focus group and his own worst enemy. He reads wildly differently to different audiences, dominating polls in the megacity's former suburbs while flaming out downtown.
For a decade, Mr. Ford was a bellowing caricature, ineffective in city-council chambers but with underestimated strength as a retail politician in his ward. As a mayoral candidate, he became an unflappable success.
That's partly thanks to a campaign team that tamed his excesses. But Mr. Ford also knew what he wanted, and he knew what recession-weary taxpayers wanted - a back-to-basics government that collected fewer taxes and issued fewer high-minded pronouncements. The contest was called eight minutes after polls closed.
Now, the question is, which Mr. Ford will return to run Toronto? Will his raw, populist instincts serve him as well in the mayor's chair? Can he continue to grow, or will he revert to his old, hair-trigger ways under the pressure of running a government larger than that of most provinces?
The answers may indicate how insurgent winners might manage in office in other provinces or even south of the border. And the clues all lie behind the scenes of one of the most remarkable campaigns in living memory.
The man with a clan
Doug Ford was driving down a Chicago highway last Jan. 7 when he got the phone call that upended his life.
"Jones - you wouldn't believe it. John Tory's not running."
Jones is 45-year-old Doug, the smoother and slimmer make of Ford elected to Toronto city council this week. Jones is also 41-year-old Rob, the rougher and rounder model elected mayor the same night.
The brothers never call each by their real names. It's always just Jones, a reciprocal tic they picked up from an Englishman who used to keep the books at Deco Labels & Tags, their multimillion-dollar printing company. These are siblings so close they share one nickname.
So Doug knew what Rob meant when he said Mr. Tory, the early conservative favourite for mayor, had stepped out of the way. "I almost drove into a telephone pole," Doug says. The brothers decided Rob's moment had arrived. But first they had to consult the rest of the Fords.
Most politicians have families - spouses and offspring who back them as reassuring props at events and in photos. Rob Ford has a clan, one that includes the only people he seems to truly trust, and it's the one he grew up with in the pocket of north Etobicoke now sometimes referred to as "Ford country." In fact, his wife, Renata, and two young children went unseen this campaign season until election night.
The Ford clan is likely to keep its sway after the scion takes office Dec. 1. Doug, who managed his brother's mayoral campaign and was elected to his former City Council seat, has already been named to Rob's transition team. He's expected to play consigliere, but he's also a rumoured candidate for a limelight role such as budget chief or deputy mayor. Mother Diane, 76, and brother Randy, 47, could also be hovering nearby.
"The Ford family has its own language," says Mark Towhey, the campaign's policy director. "It's a very tight circle and not very many people get into that circle."
A portrait of the patriarch, Doug Ford Sr., keeps watch over the Deco boardroom. He grew up poor in old East York, quitting school in Grade 5 to help his single mother and eight older siblings. In 1962 he founded Deco as a minor printing concern. Today, Deco's factories in Etobicoke, Chicago and New Jersey employ 250 people and boast annual sales of $29-million.
Youngest son Rob is chief financial officer, devoting five hours a week to the company. Doug Jr., the brains of the family, is chief executive. Randy, the other blonde, albino-lashed Ford brother, runs the local plant.
Doug Sr. also served one term as a backbench MPP in Mike Harris's Progressive Conservative government before dying of colon cancer in 2006. Rob flinches whenever he's asked about his father's death. "Dad," he told the ceiling during his victory speech, "this one's for you."
Although today's Fords inherited a company, a life of privilege and a modest Conservative pedigree, they often seem more connected to their father's hardscrabble roots.
Rob left Carleton University and its football team after three years in part to help his sister, Kathy, now 50, wrestle with a drug addiction. In 1998, her estranged common-law husband shot and killed her new boyfriend. A manslaughter conviction followed. In 2005, a different ex-boyfriend accidentally shot Ms. Ford in the face at her parents' manse, stole their Jaguar and zipped away. Such events only cement the Fords' bonds. On election night a sobbing Kathy pushed through the ecstatic crush to bearhug her brother.
Rob himself was nabbed for drunk-driving in Florida in 1999 - a skeleton he managed to keep in his closet until this summer - and was ejected from the Air Canada Centre in 2006 after unleashing a boozy tirade, events he denied before apologizing.
Wildcat behaviour aside, the clan maintains a classic blue-collar ethic: Why pay for canapés and a ballroom when you can barbeque hot dogs for 1,000 in Diane's backyard, as the family has done at countless free-to-all Ford Fests? Why rent a podium when you can bang one together with wood from Home Depot in the garage, as Doug and Randy did the night before a major news conference in July?
"The Fords aren't part of the establishment. We aren't the elites of the city," Doug says proudly. There's a hint of defensiveness.
Although a supportive family can be an asset, there's some concern the Fords could exert too much influence at City Hall. Doug has already assumed the role of unofficial spokesman, which made sense when he was campaign manager, but could be a problem now that he's a councillor-elect. Could the Fords become an insular administration?
No debts, but also little sway
It didn't take long for Richard Ciano to find out how right Doug was about the elite view of Rob Ford. Mr. Ciano, 36, a former Conservative national vice-president with a mop of curly hair and a quick laugh, offered last January to help his long-time acquaintance if he made a mayoral bid.
Candidates started snagging backroom talent. With Toronto's partyless municipal system, top Tory operatives and activists flocked to George Smitherman, an ex-Liberal cabinet minister, and Rocco Rossi, formerly Michael Ignatieff's star fundraiser.
"I have a pretty good Rolodex," says Mr. Ciano, who has managed the campaigns of suburban provincial and federal Tory victors. "But call after call after call, [it was,]'No, we won't help.'"
That was true even of Tories whose campaigns the Fords had helped personally. It seemed Toronto's Tory establishment considered the right-winger amusing at best and toxic at worst.
"It really astonished me," Mr. Ciano says. "I almost got involved initially because I felt a little sorry for him: 'If I don't do this, no one will.' It wasn't because I saw the endgame."
But Mr. Ford is popular in part because he's the consummate anti-politician. Nobody can accuse Mr. Ford of being a Trojan Horse for the Tories or a stooge of senior levels of government, his friendship with federal finance minister Jim Flaherty aside.
That said, it's hard to run a campaign without professional staff - and it may be hard to cut deals in office when you don't have anywhere to call in favours.
Mr. Authenticity gets smoother, but never slick
Speaking without thinking - at least about the political consequences - was a hallmark of Mr. Ford's 10 years on council. Opponents crawled under his skin with ease, prompting him to turn crimson, perspire and stumble through his responses in a high-pitched whine.
He left behind a trove of council-floor YouTube gems in which he blamed cyclists for their own road deaths; said AIDS "probably" only strikes gays and drug users; and praised the Asian work ethic with this bit of flattery: "Orientals work like dogs."
"Rob's so passionate and down-to-earth. But he's a terrible speaker," Doug concedes.
As a result his opponents' anemic campaigns underestimated Mr. Ford, failing to grasp that his plain-spoken style wasn't a liability. It was his best asset.
Voters in Ward 2 Etobicoke North already recognized that, re-electing him twice with more than 65 per cent of the vote. He came across as honest - despite a penchant for untruths - because he never seemed to filter his thoughts.
"Trust is a code word for authenticity," pollster Nik Nanos said in explaining why public-opinion research kept finding that Rob, despite his checkered past, was rated the most trustworthy of the mayoral candidates.
Still, Doug urged him to work out, lose weight, and seek professional media training. In the end his regimen collapsed during the campaign and he packed extra weight on his 5'10", 300-pound frame. The media training was more successful.
Arlene Cohen, a Toronto presentation and public speaking coach who trains businesspeople and politicians of all political stripes, worked with Rob for about 10 hours before his launch speech March 26.
"We rehearsed at length. He put in the time. He did all his exercises," she says. "He was very willing, very eager. … He is rough around the edges and that's part of his charm."
By all accounts, he delivered a surprisingly polished speech to a crowd of 1,600 at the Toronto Congress Centre, site of his victory bash seven months later.
Although Doug thought Rob, "hit it out of the park," he halted the presentation training after the speech. "If you change Rob, he's not going to sound like Rob any more. He's going to sound like this slick politician, like the guy he's running against."
Still, Torontonians know a little something about the perils of unleashing an inarticulate mayor on the global stage. Mel Lastman, the colourful furniture salesman who was the megacity's first mayor, came off as a rube in international interviews during the SARS crisis and Toronto's lost bid for the 2008 Olympics.
Verbal stumbles might not seem so endearing when Mayor Ford is greeting world leaders. Or a lot of voters may still love him for it - Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush got away with it.
Phone King I: The advantage is, his lines are always open
Well aware of how ridiculous it sounds, Mr. Ford's campaign staff members swear he's returned more than 200,000 calls in his 10 years in office. They saw the bankers' boxes stuffed with phone numbers that went on to form the bedrock of the campaign's voter database. And they watched him treat his phone time as a therapeutic respite from the rigours of the trail.
"You know what keeps him calm? Returning his phone calls," Adrienne Batra, 36, the campaign's director of communications, said. "That soothes him. There's nothing this man loves to do more."
Mr. Towhey initially tried to prepare Mr. Ford for debates in the car. The candidate spent half the ride on the phone. "That's how he gets in the zone. He talks to voters and to residents and helps them solve their issues with trees and plumbing."
Now the mayor-elect has made the impossible promise of acting as receptionist-in-chief for a metropolis of more than 2.5-million.
"If people didn't vote for me, I have to convince them to vote for me next time. If they want to call me and talk to me they're more than welcome to, and I'll try to respond to all the calls," he said on radio Wednesday morning. One local paper is already testing the claim. It asked three citizens to call the mayor-elect and two received callbacks within hours.
That's an impressive demonstration of his customer-service commitment. It could help him keep from losing touch with his 2.5-million constituents. But what will the mayor not be doing when he's busy as receptionist-in-chief?
Phone King II: A one-man focus group who knows his voters
In the spring, the Ford campaign conducted an in-depth internal poll of 800 Torontonians. "Wasteful spending was number one," says Mr. Ciano. "That was kind of the first thing that piqued my interest - because Rob had a 10-year record on that, right?"
"Piqued your interest? You called me and you were, like, doing cartwheels," says Nick Kouvalis, 35, Mr. Ciano's business partner in the firm Campaign Research, and the mayor-elect's newly anointed chief of staff.
Before the poll, they didn't like their candidate's odds. One of Mr. Ciano's early brainwaves was to treat all attacks as proof of how serious Mr. Ford was about "stopping the gravy train" - a focus-grouped phrase Mr. Ford would learn to repeat like a mantra.
Mr. Kouvalis, who didn't meet Mr. Ford until mid-April, was skeptical: "How could they possibly attack a guy that much?" he wondered. "Then I meet Rob and I'm like, 'Oh [expletive]… Have we got paid yet?'"
But the poll showed Mr. Ford's political instincts were spot on. He was his own best pollster. Drawing on the tens of thousands of phone calls he'd returned and home visits he'd made, Mr. Ford knew voters were angry about taxes and perceived municipal government waste.
While his opponents tussled over complicated transit policies, Mr. Ford harped on expenditures such as the $12,000 in public money retiring Councillor Kyle Rae spent on a farewell bash.
Exposing the Häagen-Dazs bars, bunny costumes and French lessons in his colleagues' $53,000 office budgets had been an obsession for years - he spent next to nothing of his own allotments. It didn't seem to matter that the cuts he championed wouldn't begin to fix city finances, or that his figures often bore little resemblance to reality.
Who cared that he exaggerated wildly when he said the city could save "at least $20-million a year" by denying 45 council members free passes for public transit, golf courses and the Toronto Zoo? Those grubby politicians got to go to the zoo for free.
"Nobody knows what people want more than Rob Ford," says Mr. Towhey, also named to the transition team. "That's his phenomenal strength.… He's very clued in to what people are upset about."
At least, he is when they're upset about what he's upset about - when his one-track mind is on the same track as the majority. If the economy improves in the next couple of years and Toronto citizens begin having priorities beyond tax-cutting, such as improved transport, culture and the environment (as they did in the more prosperous years under David Miller), will the phone be enough to keep him in synch?
Phone King III: Trouble is, one thing he can't seem to say is 'no'
The mayor-elect's phone fetish is also a liability, as his team discovered during the campaign's first major crisis in June.
"He would constantly take phone calls," Mr. Ciano says.
Mr. Kouvalis interjects. "We'd be like, 'Rob, this is important, we're talking to you!'"
Mr. Ford refused to sacrifice his cell. Mr. Ciano warned that one day a caller would catch him off-guard and he'd say something he regretted. Sure enough, on June 4, Mr. Ford was taped encouraging an ill constituent to "score" illegal painkillers on the street.
The bizarre back-story began in 2006, when Rob argued at council that the city should stop doling out HIV-AIDS grants. "If you are not doing needles and you are not gay, you wouldn't get AIDS, probably," he said.
In May, Mr. Smitherman, a gay, married father of a two-year-old boy, unearthed the comments and threw them at Mr. Ford. He resisted his team's suggestion he apologize, maintaining what he'd said was right. They eventually agreed that trying to appease the gay community, which wouldn't support them anyway, risked alienating their base.
But Doug Ford had other ideas. When a newspaper reporter mentioned a gay, married, HIV-positive reader had complained that Rob failed to return his call seeking an apology, the brothers raced to the man's apartment, reporter and photographer in tow.
"Doug believes that if they spend enough time talking to anybody, they will all love them," Mr. Towhey says.
Sure enough, the Ford brothers charmed Dieter Doneit-Henderson so thoroughly he told the newspaper he'd consider volunteering on the campaign.
But Mr. Kouvalis and, especially, Mr. Ciano were still furious. They were finding Doug much more difficult to control than his brother, especially in his off-the-cuff interactions with reporters. Mr. Ciano eventually stepped back from day-to-day operations to advise at a distance. In early June, they brought in Ms. Batra, a polished former director of the Manitoba office of the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation, as communications director.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the campaign, the Ford family had begun helping Mr. Doneit-Henderson. He suffered from fibromyalgia, for which an Ottawa doctor had prescribed a drug cocktail including the opiate OxyContin. He couldn't find a Toronto doctor who would fill his prescription for the painkiller, frequently abused as a street drug. Doug's eldest daughter, Krista, 19, drove Mr. Doneit-Henderson to clinics and appointments, but to no avail.
This is the Fords' mushy side. It can border on the naive, an endearing quality that could leave them vulnerable in power - as it did on this occasion.
Angry with what he considered a broken promise to solve his problem, Mr. Doneit-Henderson turned on a digital recorder and called Rob, begging for help in a rambling 52-minute talk.
The candidate tried half a dozen times to extricate himself before suggesting, "Why don't you go on the street and score it?" When Dieter asked if Mr. Ford could do it for him, the candidate replied, "I'll try buddy, I'll try … I don't know this [expletive] but I'll [expletive]try to find it." He later added, "What does OxyContin go for on the street, so I have an idea?"
Word soon began to circulate. Mr. Doneit-Henderson had passed a copy to the Toronto Star, bragging on Twitter that he would bring down the mayoralty candidate.
Mr. Kouvalis turned to Fraser Macdonald, the campaign's 24-year-old deputy communications director. "Whatever you've got to do," he said, "just get me this tape."
Posing on Twitter as Smitherman supporter @queensquaykaren, whose bio described her as a "downtown Toronto gal who likes politics, my cat Mittens and a good book," Mr. Macdonald sent direct messages, promising to slip the tape to a reporter. Mr. Doneit-Henderson e-mailed the audio file within a day.
Mr. Kouvalis listened, horrified. "It was like, 'Pack your bags. This campaign is over.'" He summoned Rob, Doug, Randy and Diane to the Deco boardroom and played them the recording.
"You should have seen the look on Rob's face," Mr. Kouvalis recalls. "[Mom] pointed to Dad up on the wall. Oh, man. And Doug was furious."
But unlike Mr. Smitherman, who's notorious for making his employees cry, Rob is unfailingly kind to his staff, and in return they are protective of him. Without telling him, the team decided to get out in front of the story and leak the recording to a friendly columnist at a local tabloid. A June 17 front-page headline blared that he'd been set up.
That morning, Mr. Ford held his first real news conference, explaining to the crush of cameras and reporters that he'd only made the offer to assuage a distraught caller who, he worried, knew where his wife and two young children lived.
"He went out there and he nailed it," Mr. Kouvalis says. "He was tough. He was strong. He wasn't backing down from anybody. I was real proud of him. We got through it."
You have to wonder how many other eccentric callers could tie up the mayor's office in the next four years - not only on the phone but in damage control. As Mr. Kouvalis admits he was worried the public would think, "A mayor doesn't get somebody off the phone by saying, 'I'll help you rob a bank next week if you'll just hang up right now.'"
If it does happen, though, it seems they have their strategy down.
How to maintain a Teflon coat
As summer wore on, it seemed like what couldn't kill Mr. Ford's campaign only made it stronger. Debate prep was minimal. It didn't matter what the question was, according to Mr. Towhey: "The answer is the gravy train."
Transportation and financial policies were released in the middle of the night in low-budget YouTube videos. "We weren't going to win on policy," Mr. Towhey says.
"We started to realize we had tapped into the mild-mannered Canadian equivalent of a tax revolt. It was just this populist uprising. I'm not sure there are any playbooks in Canada for a populist uprising."
But in late August, having already enraged his opponents by suggesting in a TV debate that Toronto had no more room for immigrants, a more serious problem emerged.
Riding around the city in the Ford camper van, Mr. Ford took a call from a Toronto Sun reporter. Mr. Kouvalis listened to Mr. Ford's side: He was insulted. No, he'd never been arrested for drugs - Mr. Kouvalis ripped the phone out of his hand, shut it and (well aware of his charge's tendency to jump to denial) demanded the full story.
In 1999, a 29-year-old Rob had been caught drunk driving in Florida. When he was pulled over he had a joint in his back pocket. He pleaded guilty to the DUI, and the pot charge was dropped.
There was another damage-control press conference. This time, they weren't worried. Rob Ford was Teflon. Mr. Kouvalis remembers joking, " 'He smoked a joint. He'll probably go to 45 [per cent]' … And he did."
After that, the campaign put Mr. Ford in a box. They avoided substantial media and debates as much as possible, a strategy that will be impossible to replicate when Mr. Ford takes office, but which worked perfectly on the trail. Nothing could stop them.
A mayor, however, doesn't stay Teflon for long. And although Mr. Kouvalis has been named chief-of-staff, he can't be expected to babysit Mr. Ford every day for the next four years, watching his every phone call, as he learned to do on the hustings. Mr. Ford will have to learn to be his own censor, his own superego.
Pulling into 'gravy' station
On election night, Mr. Ford looked stunned by the speed and size of his win. He rose from his mother's basement couch to kiss his wife, Renata, who, like the couple's young son and daughter, was making her campaign debut at its denouement.
Turning to the reporters in attendance, he fell back on comfortable platitudes: "The people are really fed up with the wasteful spending and I want to thank them for their vote of confidence, and I just cannot wait to put an end to the gravy train."
Now Mr. Ford has to demonstrate that he can move beyond rhetoric. His early choices suggest that, at the very least, he understands a strong mayor needs even stronger advisers - an improvement over outgoing mayor David Miller, often knocked for his need to be the smartest guy in the room.
Mr. Ford drafted Case Ootes, the respected dean of city-hall conservatives, to lead his transition team. He's already anointed Mr. Kouvalis chief of staff, a signal he's learned there are advantages to bending to a solid adviser's will.
As he rounds out his staff, he'll need to find a softer character to play good cop to Mr. Kouvalis's bad.
Mr. Ford also named his brother to his transition team, and is rumoured to be considering the councillor-elect for a senior post, more evidence of the influence the Ford clan could wield.
Four years from now, Mr. Ford will be judged on whether he governed as well as he campaigned.
His best qualities - a plainspoken manner, an obsession with customer service, an uncanny understanding of voters' desires - could whither in the cocoon of the mayor's office, or emerge again transformed.
His weaknesses are clear: Can a guy who's not great at either policy or public speaking be a great mayor? Can a man who's so naive he offers to buy drugs for a disturbed stranger exercise the judgment to lead the country's largest city?
Most of all, perhaps: Can a lone wolf play nice with the moderate councillors and the other levels of government whose support he'll need to pass his agenda?
One early move hints Mr. Ford might not be as divisive as feared, at least if his big brother has his way.
In a confusing scrum with reporters Wednesday, the mayor-elect backtracked on a controversial campaign pledge to phase out Toronto's streetcars.
The questions arose after Doug told a local newspaper that, "by no means are we going to get a crane and start yanking up streetcars and throwing them in the lake."
The broken promise sounded like Doug going rogue again - but in this case, that might not be such a bad thing. Removing even one downtown streetcar would be a recipe for council civil war. If Doug, a city-hall rookie, is smart enough to know better, then the mayor-elect is already better off with his brother as consigliere.
So far, it looks like the disciplined Rob Ford who impressed on the campaign trail might actually stick around to govern.
The Globe's Kelly Grant will be participating in a live chat about Rob Ford and his future as mayor at 2 p.m. ET Monday.
Kelly Grant