Ralph Lean On Team Ford

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The Globe and Mail reports that influential ‘bagman’ (a campaign fundraising bundler) and prominent Cassels Brock lawyer Ralph Lean has signed up for a Ford Nation passport in 2014. Aside from a brief sojourn as a David Miller booster in 2006, Lean has long supported conservative politicians, and speaks of his issues as being the spending problem at city hall and supporting increased privatization. This Fordian language aside, he supported Smitherman in 2010.

Over at his Grid blog, Edward Keenan argues Lean’s approach to calling donors, asking who they want to support, and then backing that horse, diminishes the weight of his decision.

While I agree this approach says less about Lean then the network around him, that secondary story is still telling.

In her Toronto Life profile of “The Weirdest Mayoralty Ever,” Marci McDonald points to conservative fundraising elites as telling Ford they won’t support him in 2014. Lean’s approval shows there is a pool of money who will, and Shelley Carroll or whoever else runs will find that particular money unavailable.

For all of the strengths running his 2010 campaign, the Ford team struggled in mastering the money game too, as seen in subsequent filings. Moreover, the mayor finished his campaign with a record deficit (Lean helped to retire this debt). Raising money at the municipal level is tough, particularly for an anti-establishment candidate like Ford. The likes of Lean go a long way to building those bridges.

Lastly, there’s the most obvious lesson here: Although this term isn’t half over, the 2014 campaign is under way. Ford has said as much before, but it’s hard to take any of his grandiose statements seriously. When Lean, a respected elite fundraiser, says the wheels are in motion, then the game is on.

 

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