-- Toronto Life, Editor's Letter by Sarah Fulford, January 2011
"[T]he city is ready to bust out of its self-stifling punctiliousness … We need a brash mayor who will throw some weight around. Which brings us to George Smitherman, the oddsmakers’ favourite in the October 25 mayoral election … Smitherman is staking his campaign on the issue of job creation, while his rivals are proposing no end of brazen ideas—from subway networks to privatizations to casinos—in an effort to be what he already is: larger than life.
The Conservative strategist Jaime Watt—one of the architects of the Harris Conservatives’ two majority election victories and a partner with Navigator, the PR firm, and now one of the key players on Smitherman’s campaign team—once said that the key to image management isn’t to make a politician into someone he’s not, but to convince voters that a particular politician, warts and all, is the person they want to elect for the job at hand. And George Smitherman is looking more and more like the proverbial right guy in the right place at the right time."
-- Toronto Life, 50 Reasons to Love Toronto, Philip Preville, June 2010
