In the one TV ad in which Prime Minister Stephen Harper addresses voters — an ad released Friday during a Toronto Blue Jays game, making it late in the ninth inning of the campaign — he faces the camera dressed in a shirt open at the neck, as if to let voters see the man behind the business suit. He says:

“This election isn’t about me.”

It’s a measure of the ugly divisiveness of the Conservatives’ campaign that for the first time I can remember a political leader has publicly disassociated himself from himself.

The ad is a sad and puzzling thing to watch, since no one likes to see a man beg, and so viewers are left to make of it what they will.

Is he pleading for forgiveness? Is he admitting that he, himself, is the greatest liability to his future mandate? Or is he trying to get back on message after months of pulling on Justin Trudeau’s hair?

Whatever the intent of the ad — and I can’t help but suspect Harper’s handlers were hoping to push the sympathy button — it succeeds in doing one thing clearly. It refutes itself. This election isn’t about Stephen Harper? Nonsense. This election is about nothing else. If it wasn’t, why would Harper feel the need to deny it?

It must be about him. To the unprecedented extent he has centralized power in the PMO’s office, to the absolute control he has over his MPs, Harper is the Conservative Party, the Tito to their Yugoslavia.

Uniquely, he’s made himself so, not by a cult of personality, which is what he would accuse Trudeau of, but by a cult of anti-personality. He is charismatically uncharismatic, an emotionally distant cipher who appealed to a fearful electorate craving stability.

They got more than they bargained for. His bland exterior failed to hide a simmering meanness. It wasn’t enough for him to be political, with all the compromise that politics demand: he had to be doctrinaire. He developed a smart guy’s impatience. He picked fights with everybody. The two prorogations of Parliament, the omnibus bills and bulldozing of debate, the muzzling of federal government scientists, the strict vetting of public information, even of the most inoffensive kind, the open war against environmental groups opposing pipeline proposals, the disregard for and disrespect of the Supreme Court and the rights of citizens that court protects, the stupid and needless cancellation of the full-form census, the outright hostility to the media … on and on it went, to what purpose only Harper knew. And that’s not even counting the lingering stench emanating from the Senate.

That mean-spiritedness coloured the Conservative campaign. Attack ads are the stock and trade in every modern campaign, and used by every party, but like never before did they define the Conservative voice — a preacher warning of fire and brimstone.

I suspect that the electorate began to tire of that dreary message early on, and thirsted for something more hope-inspiring, which may explain the Liberals’ surge in the polls. How many times, after all, can you listen to puerile remarks about Trudeau’s hair without wanting to tear out your own?

Nor can I recall a campaign — at least in Canada — where a party hoped to win votes by scaring the living crap out of the electorate. Once upon a time, a politician promised a chicken in every pot; here, they warn of a jihadist under every bed. If anything tells us how much smaller we’ve become as a country, it’s this pandering to our worst fears.