Energizer Bunny + Chucky = Toronto’s crack-smoking Mayor Rob Ford

What would happen if the Energizer Bunny mated with Chucky? The result would probably look something like Toronto’s crack-smoking mayor, Rob Ford. He has become the political horror show that just keeps going, and going, and going.

After the Toronto City Council stripped him of all his non-statutory powers in November, reducing him to nothing more than a bobblehead, I mean figurehead, Ford was supposed to go away, get sober and engage in some meaningful introspection.

Not that anyone would have noticed his absence from City Hall.

As Toronto Star reporter Robyn Doolittle told me last week, “He’s been a nonexistent figure for a long time. It’s weird. He’s not here, and he’s not around City Hall. We don’t know where he is or where he’s going. He has no schedule. Every now and then, he has a press avail.”

But, she noted, his attitude with reporters is: “If anyone asks me about what I am not going to talk about, I’m gonna leave.”

Doolittle, who was the first journalist to see the videotape of the mayor smoking what looks like crack cocaine, has written a chronicle of the mayor’s life that became an instant Canadian best seller when it was published this month.

“Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story” examines the mayor’s privileged but dysfunctional upbringing in a suburban Toronto family where great things were expected of four children, all of whom have gotten off track with drugs and/or alcohol at various points in their lives. (“All three of the mayor’s older siblings,” reported the Toronto Globe and Mail last year, “have had ties to drug traffickers.”)

She offers a primer on Toronto political history, explaining that tension between the more liberal residents of the city’s core and the tax-conscious suburbanites (who far outnumber the downtown population) gave rise to Ford’s curious success.

Doolittle tries to explain the inexplicable confidence of Ford, who has said he wants to be prime minister, as “blind ambition that does not seem to be rooted in anything concrete.”

For awhile, it seemed as the game might be up, that poor, beleaguered Toronto might return to something approaching business as usual after the council moved to de-clown City Hall.

But the Ford circus just keeps rolling on.

On Jan. 21, Ford was videotaped at a fast food place in the suburb where he lives, blasted out of his mind and speaking, or rather, slurring, in a fake Jamaican accent, saying despicable things about Toronto’s chief of police, whose department has launched a criminal investigation into the mayor’s activities.

On Feb. 8, the Toronto Star reported that while visiting British Columbia earlier in the month, Ford got a jaywalking ticket, then visited a Vancouver-area bar. Witnesses, who told the Star the mayor was speaking “gibberish,” said he spent an hour in the restaurant’s tiny staff bathroom, then emerged “incoherent and fidgety before ordering rounds of drinks.”

On Sunday, he was videotaped running “groin first” into a fire hydrant while celebrating Canada’s gold medal in Olympic men’s hockey. (OK, that looked like an unfortunate accident.)

Tuesday, he sat for an interview with “The Today Show’s” Matt Lauer, who asked if the mayor is still getting high.

“No,” said Ford, chuckling. “I don’t use illegal drugs. I experimented with them probably a year ago.”

“Are you still drinking heavily on occasion, Mr. Mayor?”

“No, not at all,” Ford said. “Have I had a drink, yes, but not to the point of some of the episodes before. So you know what? That’s past me and we’re movin’ on.”

When Lauer reminded him of his Jamaican-inflected tirade, Ford riposted with his favorite peremptory defense: “You know what, Matt? Maybe you’re perfect, but I’m not.”

Perfection? I think the citizens of Toronto would probably settle for a chief executive who does not lie, is not self-deluded, does not smoke crack (even occasionally), is not a raving alcoholic, does not hang out with known criminals, is not the subject of domestic violence calls to police and is not under the cloud of a criminal investigation.

After Ford’s interview with Lauer, he attended a news conference at Toronto City Hall, ostensibly to talk about an upcoming meeting with other big city Canadian mayors. After staying on topic for several minutes, reporters asked him to clarify his remarks to Lauer.

After all, as reporters have pointed out, Ford lied many times to reporters last year about whether or not he had used illegal drugs before admitting in November that he had smoked crack. When he finally did admit it, Ford disingenuously claimed reporters hadn’t posed the question correctly.

“Have you used illegal drugs at any point since November?” a reporter asked Tuesday.

“Is there any other questions?” the mayor responded before exiting the room, true to Doolittle’s observation. As he fled his press corps, a reporter caught the mayor’s last muttered thought, “I think you’re jealous because I did an interview with an American station.”

Could the mayor of Canada’s largest city be any more provincial?

“He’s a character unlike anyone who exists in real life,” said “Crazy Town” author Doolittle, who is probably not jealous of his NBC interview, as she has appeared on CNN, “The Daily Show” and is to be a guest this week on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”

Doolittle cautioned against underestimating Ford, who is running for reelection.

“Rob Ford frequently says he’d like to be prime minister,” Doolittle told me. “People laugh at that, and I am not saying he could be--but don’t discount the fact that he did become the mayor of Toronto, one of the largest cities in North America. The people who ran against him have been qualified, educated and powerful. The Fords, despite all their failings and their history of lying and substance abuse and connections to criminals, are very successful.”

Scary stuff.

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Twitter: @robinabcarian

robin.abcarian@latimes.com