Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s advertisements have been rather interesting this primary campaign. First there was “Believe” an ad that ran in both Iowa and New Hampshire. The ad caught the attention of the media because of the inclusion of the on screen title “CHRISTIAN LEADER” when it ran in Iowa, but not in New Hampshire.

In his most recent ad “What really matters” Huckabee pretends to get above the fray and issue a nonpolitical holiday greeting.

There are two problems with this. First, Huckabee’s political message has simply been that he is a Christian, and that is why you should vote for him. So in reminding you of ‘what really matters’ this season, be it holiday or political, he staying perfectly on message.

Second, there is a not so subliminal message:

In the ad the camera pans slowly from right to left, and for 19 seconds of the 30 second advertisement the brightly lit white shelves of a cabinet form a big white cross. You know who ever created this ad was well aware of this, as they added a neat pile of Christmas tree ornaments as to make it obvious that it is a shelf that just happens to looks like a cross, rather than a cross outright.

It seems to me the problem is that his ads are not political enough. We’re electing the next Commander-in-Chief, not Pastor-in-Chief.

Update: I see a few minutes after I posted this that Matt Drudge has a link to the video with the headline: “HUCKABEE AD FEATURES FLOATING ‘CROSS’… DEVELOPING…“

I guess I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

Every presidential election various media organizations rerun the same story: They find a Republican fed up with the GOP who is going to vote for a Democrat this time. (Oddly, they don’t ever seem to find any Democrats voting for a Republican.) The first such story I have come across this election cycle is from the New York Times:

Dee Vandeventer, 54, who owns an advertising firm (it does not accept political advertising) and lives in nearby Cedar Falls, was standing on a chair in the auditorium trying to take a picture of Mr. Obama after his speech. She was perched a little precariously up there, but she talked with us for a couple of minutes.

“We’re tired of being Republicans,” she said.

She said she and her husband, Dave, were keeping completely open minds this year and had no idea at this point how they’d vote in the caucuses on Jan. 3. Of the Republicans, they said they were most interested in Rudolph W. Giuliani, mainly because he is “moderate” and “was responsive” on 9/11.

But it took her 23-year-old daughter to get her to consider Mr. Obama in the first place. “I had said, ‘Obama doesn’t have any experience,’ and she said, ‘I have three words for you: John Fitzgerald Kennedy.’” That made Mrs. Vandeventer consider the possibility, she said, even though she voted for Richard Nixon (she was too young to vote in 1960, when Nixon ran against Kennedy, but she voted for him in 1968, when he won).

It is interesting that Katharine Q. Seelye, the Times reporter, could figure out that Mrs. Vandeventer was only 7 years-old in 1960, and unable to vote, but failed to realize that Vandeventer was only 15 years-old in 1968, when the voting age was still 21. It is rather impossible that she voted for Nixon, unless she lied about her age. It makes me wonder if she really is (was?) a Republican as well.

I would like good explanation from the Des Moines Register why perennial crackpot candidate Alan Keyes was included in the last debate before the Iowa caucus? Dean Barnett, of the Weekly Standard:

Keyes’s distracting presence was yet another indictment of the unworthiness of the Iowa media for the enormous role it plays in this process. Keyes isn’t just a frivolous candidate for president. He’s not a candidate at all. And yet he was allowed on the stage to toss bombs and to perversely whine about his lack of airtime.

Oddly enough, Dennis Kucinich, who has as much chance of winning his party’s nomination as Keyes, has been excluded from Register debate for Democrats to be held tomorrow. Kucinich has at least been at all of the other debates.

The Republican candidates have had, if I counted correctly, ten debates. Not a single one of them have told us anything of any import about any of the candidates. The only debate that has been close to being serious was the FOX News “First in the South” even way back in May. Something has to change.

Gallup has a poll of 1,027 “national adults” on what type of candidate they would or would not vote for, mostly looking at if Americans would vote for a Mormon. Results:

 (Keep in mind these are “adults” not “voters” or even “likely voters” so actually elections results could vary by a lot.)    

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee:

“I had to come to the conclusion that I only had one client… when I laid my head on the pillow, I’d say, ‘Lord, are you pleased?’ … even if I get voted out of office, I’ll never get voted out of heaven.”

On Kenneth Copeland’s Believer’s Voice of Victory the week on November 25, 2007.

In an otherwise favorable article about John Edwards in this last weekend’s New York Times Magazine comes this great little snark:

[I]t doesn’t help when Edwards tries so hard to establish his affinity for the common man that it makes you wince. When the Fortress story first surfaced, for instance, he told Nedra Pickler of The Associated Press that he joined the hedge fund partly because he wanted to learn more about the way markets affected inequality. This is rather like saying you hired a stripper in order to better understand the exploitation of women.  

When even the Times see you as a phony, not many other people are buying it either.

New York Times: The Poverty Platform