If power corrupts, it also blinds. Consider the sad case of David Miller.
However it ends, the story of this election has been Rob Ford and the wave of voter anger that fuels him. People right across the country are talking about it. Yet, according to the Mayor, it simply does not exist.
"Do you think Torontonians are angry?" The Globe's Anna Mehler Paperny asked him in a recent interview. "No," was his reply. "No?" she asked, incredulous. "No."
"I disagree fundamentally with the premise that Torontonians are angry. It's just not true." To the contrary, says Mr. Miller, Torontonians are so pleased with the progress of the city that, according to one recent poll, they would re-elect him for a third term if he had chosen to run.
Waving his 2006 election booklet, he boasted: "I've done everything that's in it." Mission accomplished! He could not mention a single thing in his seven years in office that he would have done differently.
Mr. Miller is in a state of denial of positively oceanic depths. Like Edith Piaf, he regrets nothing. Worse, he sees nothing.
For at least a year, it has been evident to any waking person that something big is stirring in Toronto. Last summer's garbage strike, bungled by Mr. Miller, touched off profound feelings of discontent over how the city is being run. A poll showed that taxpayers' confidence in the way city hall managed their money was the lowest in Canada.
Mr. Ford did not come out of the clear blue sky. He is the direct product of that discontent - a discontent that grew straight from the Miller years.
It is no accident that the one candidate who defends his administration, his deputy Joe Pantalone, is running last. Nor is it an accident that a man who rejects everything Mr. Miller stands for is one of the front-runners.
Whether the Mayor likes it or not, Mr. Ford is his direct descendant. In the same way that voters veered to Conservative Mike Harris after the leftward march of Bob Rae's NDP government, many Toronto voters have moved to the penny-pinching Mr. Ford after growing sick of the preachy, greener-than-thou Miller government. As surely as Abraham begat Isaac, Miller begat Ford.
Mr. Miller seems to be the only man in the city who does not comprehend this. In a peevish lecture this week, he suggested that the media obsession with the trivial and the personal had overshadowed many of his achievements, from progress on the waterfront to transit expansion to a new focus on troubled priority neighbourhoods.
Mr. Miller has many little-celebrated accomplishments, including moves to ensure greater integrity in government and ease the tax burden on city businesses, but successful leaders don't moan about how the media has failed to explain their brilliance to the public. Their job is not just to state a vision and pursue it, but to persuade the public to follow. Somewhere along the road, Mr. Miller lost the city.
While he was painting a dream city in the sky, or fighting for green roofs and five-cent plastic bags, many ordinary people started wondering why their rates and taxes kept going up and the Mayor was still begging other governments for money. Then along came Mr. Ford to say he would wave a wand and fix it all. They would not be listening to his nonsense if they thought Mr. Miller's tenure was such a triumph.
Are they angry? You bet - angry enough to consider handing the chain of office to a man manifestly unfit for the job. If Mr. Miller does not see that he shares some responsibility for that, then he is truly out of touch with the city he loves.
Marcus Gee