Perhaps this could be titled “Rear-view Mirror Politics”. Other names could be “vision-less politics”, or perhaps “hot-button campaigning”.
I’ve scraped the web site of NPA Mayoral hopeful Glen (“Making the world safe for muscle cars”) Chernen and prepared a word cloud from it. The word “bicycle” and its derivatives appear 4 times; “housing” 3 times. The words “zoning”, “pipeline”, “climate” and “Green” do not appear.
And an NPA dynamic duo may emerge — Chernen and De Genova — battling for the rights of motor vehicle operators, hitting motor car hot buttons until their fingers bleed.
I do wonder if there are enough angry old white men to elect these two in October. It’s a real gamble on sub-group size, which I suppose is business as usual in the world of civic politics.
Oh oh. Hector Bremner will either need to jump over to Vision or the Greens, or get a get a bored out Trans Am. Otherwise there could be an interesting friction within the NPA.
They seemed to want to fight the last two elections partially being opposed to bicycle lanes, despite the NPA’s previous history of supporting cycling. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Is this the NPA’s fate?
Also they say that the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over while expecting different results.