Huckabee just can’t win for losing. In addition to the understandable criticism of his insane right-wing politics and values, he’s getting tagged for the smarmy dog-whistle content of his ads. In particular, his recent Christmas ad, informing our 1/4 non-Christian nation that “at this time of year . . . what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Christ”, has been criticized for including a huge glowing white cross hovering over Huckabee’s shoulder and slowly gliding behind his head (!) as he speaks.

The strangest thing is that his campaign seems to be lying about how it got there, pedaling peddling [oy!] a story to USA Today (repeated without the slightest critical inquiry by the credulous Byron York at NRO) that the whole thing was an unplanned coincidence resulting from a national-campaign ad shoot so casual there wasn’t even a script. Not only is the story absurd on its face, it’s actually physically impossible.

The image is not exactly subtle:

Screen shot of Huckabee ad with cross.

Huckabee’s campaign explains this as a mere accident - he was sitting in front of a white built-in bookcase, and the vertical riser and two horizontal shelves of the bookcase just happened to look like a cross and just happened to be positioned right next to his head in the frame, and nobody noticed.

Um, that seems kind of unlikely, given the extreme attention to detail that goes into every phase of a campaign - especially ads that cost millions of dollars to air. Even weirder is the campaign’s claim that the ad was totally ad-libbed, and shot in just two takes:

after returning to Arkansas late at night from an exhausting campaign swing through Iowa, Huckabee found himself in a private home in Little Rock, sitting in front of a camera in a red sweater, wishing everybody a Merry Christmas. The ad was all concept; there was no script. The camera rolled, and Huckabee ad-libbed the message. The first take was two seconds too long. Huckabee did it again, hitting the time right on the money, and the ad — called “What Really Matters” — was done.

Bullshit.

Yes, it’s believable that, left to his own devices, Huckabee would find himself gibbering about “Christ” and “Christmas” three times in five sentences, and that he would willingly state to a quarter of the electorate that they are not part of “what really matters” for an entire season of the year. But it’s not believable that he could, or his campaign would, shoot a major ad with no preparation whatsoever, without even bothering to consider what appeared in the background, and then put it on TV without looking at it.

But the kicker is this: the ad cannot have been shot the way they said.

First of all, it’s not just a simple matter of “sitting in front of a camera”. The background in the ad moves, meaning the shot was dynamic and planned in advance. (They blocked the shot but didn’t look at what was actually in the frame? Right.) But it moves in a weird way. It looks like a normal pan shot - the kind we are all used to seeing on TV: the camera moves from side to side, and the image in the frame moves accordingly. But if you look carefully at this ad, you can see that it’s much more sophisticated than that: the background moves, but Huckabee does not. He remains in exactly the same place throughout the scene - just slightly to the right of center, leaving a convenient space over his right shoulder for the background image to be seen - and remains directly facing the camera. (The camera also zooms out very slowly, making the image of Huckabee’s head a bit smaller, but this does not affect the shot angles.) As the image changes, the cross slowly moves toward Huckabee and slides behind his head, and a Christmas tree moves in from the left and takes up the same position over Huckabee’s shoulder, but his position in the frame, and the camera’s angle on his face, never change.

          Frame from start of Huckabee ad.     Frame from end of Huckabee ad.

If this were a pan shot, Huckabee would stay in the same position relative to the background, and the whole image - Huckabee and the cross - would move together off the right edge of the screen, with Huckabee’s gaze sliding off to the viewer’s right. If it were a rotating shot - the camera moving around Huckabee but pointing straight at him - Huckabee would remain in the same part of the frame but the camera angle on him would change; we’d wind up looking at his left ear. Instead, Huckabee remains in the same spot at the same angle, and the background - only - slides left-to-right. 

The only way to do this is to put Huckabee and the camera on a rolling platform and roll it or rotate it right-to-left in front of the background, or, alternatively, build a fake interior set and slide the entire set (but not Huckabee or the camera) left-to-right behind Huckabee as he talks. Either way, this was very far from being a casual, unscripted, unplanned, two-take ad-lib.

So, who cares?

There’s no reason to, really, if Huckabee would just cop to being the smarmy, manipulative, radical Christianist that he is. He can’t stop talking about Jesus and how much he thinks everyone who isn’t a Christian like him is on the wrong path, but he insists on simultaneously positioning himself as some sort of all-around guy who would never - how could we imagine it? - stick exclusivist religious language in his ads and literally put himself on a glowing cross, you know, deliberately or anything. But why does he need to lie about this?

Huckabee’s entire campaign is based on being the biggest Christian in the Republican field. But he seems to vaguely grasp that he’s also scary to the vast majority of Americans who aren’t as crazy as him, so he simultaneously denies that he’s doing what he’s obviously doing, while doing it as aggressively as he can. It reaches absurd proportions when his campaign feels the need to lie about how many takes they used to make a TV ad. It’s an utterly trivial issue - except that the campaign itself feels they cannot allow themselves to tell the truth about it.

And the big white cross, which started this whole mess?: the entire ad was obviously carefully planned and staged, literally down to the inch (they could not have lined up the moving-background shot without such planning), and that includes what appears in the background. They went to great lengths to have the shot end up with a Christmas tree over Huckabee’s shoulder; they obviously gave the same amount of attention to what was over his shoulder when they started the sequence - which just happened to be a big white cross.

It’s cheesy, exclusivist, and manipulative, but that’s Huckabee to a “T”. What’s notable about this is that they just won’t admit it - in fact, concocted a ridiculous story to deny it, when the truth was not going to reveal anything about them that was more damaging than the ad itself.

And remember, this is Huckabee on his good behavior - when he’s trying to broaden his appeal. You can just imagine what he’d be like with a “mandate”.

UPDATE: Added some links. [Fixed a mipsle.]