Being the incumbent is a giant aid in politics. That’s why the incumbent’s signs say re-elect so and so.If the incumbent wasn’t favoured, those signs would all say more simply elect so and so.
But right now the Kitchener, Canada mayoral race has no real incumbent. Mayor Carl Zehr is set to retire when this election is decided.
The first thing to do to try to create the feel of an incumbent is to have your name be vaguely familiar to the public in some way. Mayoral candidate Dan Glenn-Graham achieved this by working the last four years as a city of Kitchener councillor.
But Councillor Dan Glenn-Graham’s main trick to creating the feel of being an incumbent is that he has a working time travel machine. Imagine that for a moment. I’ll outline how that goes.
It is my belief that Glenn-Graham went about 5 or 6 years into the past. Upon arrival he of course invested in certain stocks that will outperform the market by a drastic amount. But most importantly he went into the past to whisper into a CTV (Canadian Television network) executive’s ear. He said commandingly that, “I believe you should start a television show about a run for mayor. It should be called, ‘Dan for Mayor.’”
All that is history now, and many Kitchener residents watched the national show religiously. Why? Because it was shot in Kitchener, Waterloo and Hamilton. Local residents could play “Where’s that location?” I personally remember Kitchener City Hall, a Kitchener appliance store, a Kitchener old timey water tower and Waterloo’s Heuther Hotel.
The fictional city of the story was called Wessex. But we all knew it in reality as Kitchener. The title is the slogan Dan for Mayor and I bet Dan Glenn-Graham did his best to stop himself from using that on his campaign signs. But still Dan and Mayor are of course used prominently in his Twitter handle of @electdanmayor .
Glenn-Graham could have done much worse with his time machine. This way he just has the feel of an incumbent, and someone else could still win.
Some will poopoo my time machine explanation. The only way to prove it would be to examine Glenn-Graham’s stock portfolio to see that he invested brilliantly some five or six years ago. I don’t have to. I know that Dan for Mayor is no casual coincidence. [Edit Sept. 21, 2014: That’s Glenn-Graham and not Glenn Graham]
