Election 2015 was to national politics what the Seventh Inning — yes, that should be capitalized — was to baseball.
It was incredibly long.
Things happened that you’d never dream of seeing.
It was extraordinarily error-prone.
And for a few moments in both contests, you wondered if things were going to slip out of control.
People are still marvelling at all that happened in a single inning of the Blue Jays-Rangers game on Wednesday that decided who goes to the league championship series. The phrase “roller-coaster of emotions” was retired and placed in the Cliché Hall of Fame posthumously, after being beaten to death in the hours after the game.
You wonder if years from now, Election 2015 will stand out in similar fashion.
It went into history right from the outset as one of the longest ever. Prime Minister Stephen Harper set Oct. 19 as the date on Aug. 2 for various strategic reasons. But calling an 11-week campaign is like reverting to the 19th century, when candidates travelled in buggies for weeks on end with no Wi-Fi in staggered campaigns that took months to determine.
A lot can go wrong in 11 weeks. And a lot did.
The historic inning lasted 53 minutes, usually the time it takes to play three innings or more. People vowed after the game to write books about the inning. Or make movies. A network aired an hour-long special about it last night.
It’s one of those rare cases where the word “epic” really applies.
The box score shows four errors — three Rangers and one Blue Jay — a week or two’s worth in normal times.
The box score for the election campaign lists 12 candidates who were yanked or quit for saying offensive, stupid or just weird stuff on social media. Another dozen got in hot water to some degree, but hung on. Social-media gaffes are a fact of life in 21st-century campaigns, but the “victims of their own foolishness” tally has never been higher than it was in this one. There needs to be some discussion during the post-mortem about this. Either we raise our tolerance level for social-media expression and allow for more stupidity. Or we bar anyone with a Facebook page from running.
The most arresting moment of the ball game was when a batter brought a run in by hitting the ball when it was returning to the mound, rather than when it was headed in the more traditional direction. You don’t see that every day.
The “did that just happen?” moment of the campaign was when it veered into a protracted debate about whether women should be allowed to cover their faces while taking the citizenship oath. It has the smallest possible applicability of any governmental policy. But it occupied the politicians’ attention for weeks.
Even stranger, this mattered most in Quebec. Nice to see them interested in the details of Canadian citizenship. But weird.
After the ruling that the reverse-hit run counted, the furious rain of beer cans prompted remarks on the potential for Toronto to slide out of control.
The fans’ rage was similar to the Harper Derangement Syndrome that gripped many voters throughout the campaign. There are people who can work themselves into a frothing rage at the mere sight of him. It’s not to the extent of throwing beer cans near babies, as a few Toronto idiots did. But the reaction seems out of proportion to all the many unpopular moves he’s made. The single most revealing aspect of the campaign was more about the electorate than the leaders. When Canadian voters get their hockey on, look out.
Both the inning and the campaign were compelling in two completely different senses. People watched half of both showdowns with rapt attention and enthusiasm. The other halves were spent peeking between the fingers of the hands they were holding over their faces.
The Seventh Inning — the Hour of Power — distilled all the anxiety, rage, bewilderment and hope from the exhausting, baffling campaign into six outs.
It ended with a home run and a bat flip.
There’s no telling who will flip the bat Monday night. But they’d better do it with the same panache, because it’s going to represent a historic win.
