Huckabee: An Exceedingly Clever Christian (but don’t tell anyone)
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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:
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.
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.]
informing our 1/4 non-Christian nation
He’s not talking to them, though. Remember, this is primary season, not a general election. So he’s not sending his messages to the entire electorate. He’s tailoring them to what will resonate with likely Republican primary voters. How many of those is he likely to alienate with an ad like this? I’m betting that number is close to zero.
Further, pretty much every candidate does this sort of thing. The religion issue is one we’re particularly sensitive to, so it’s one that’s more likely to draw our ire, but it could just as easily have been PSH* over terrorism, or children’s health care, or whatever else.
* - Pants-shitting hysteria (h/t: SayUncle)
Comment 12/19/2007
We must eliminate anything that meets at a 90 degree angle. All bookshelves must go. Square window panes must be eliminated. Streets may not cross unless the angle is more or less than 90 degrees. Arms may not be extended perpendicular to the body. Politicians may not hold both arms up in a victory stance because it may elicit an image of Christ hanging on the cross.
You atheists need to get a life. +++++++++++ Do those symbols offend you?
Comment 12/19/2007
Tgirsch:
You’re right about his intention, but the others will remember this later. And the real issue is not that he put a cross in his video, but that he would so absurdly deny it, and then concoct a laughable story about how he shoots his campaign ads by accident to explain it.
I don’t quite get your analogy to other issues. Certainly every candidate emphasizes what they take to be their main issue or strength, and that raises the danger of driving away voters who take the opposite position on that issue. But that’s not what’s going on here. Huckabee is not merely reaching out to Christian voters; he explicitly stated that Christianity is “what really matters” about the holiday season. He didn’t just pointedly not wish non-Christians a happy holiday (though vast numbers of them also have holidays at this time of year); he said their holidays are not what matters. That’s going out of his way to be offensive.
Now he’s issued a statement whining that he’s not allowed to “wish people a Merry Christmas”. But nobody ever complained that he said “Merry Christmas”; they’re complaining that (among other things) he said that Christmas, alone, is “what really matters”.
Comment 12/19/2007
but the others will remember this later
I wish this were true, but I’m not so sure.
In any case, the whole “Christians are the only ones who matter” bit is far from being unique to Huckabee. About the only thing that separates him from some of the others is Chutzpah.
He’s not even the only one to openly advance religion to the exclusion of others. Romney, after all, said “Freedom requires religion,” a slap in the face to the roughly 11% of Americans who consider themselves to be non-religious.
But as you note, Huckabee’s messages are the most explicity, because he’s built his campaign entirely on the premise of telling the evangelicals that “I’m your guy.” As such, as much as such statements might offend me, they don’t surprise me in the least.
Comment 12/19/2007
People should quit trying to turn Christmas into a religious holiday (oops, can we use the word “holiday”?). Traditionally, this time of year has been about Christmas. It’s a fact of history. Reading all kinds of evil intent into any mention of Christmas is rediculous.
Comment 12/19/2007
For pretty much all of my life (and probably for some decades before it), Christmas in America has been a lot more about shopping and gifts and Santa and Rudolph than about Christianity. In fact, it’s all of these things, and not the “Christ” part, that make the holiday so popular. These secular aspects have been used to broaden the appeal of the holiday, to the extent that Christmas is, for the most part, a secular holiday these days. Much to the chagrin of conservative Christians, of course, who want to have their cake and eat it, too, by having their holiday be both wildly popular and explicitly religious.
Notice that the commercialization of Christmas doesn’t seem to bother most of them in the slightest, until such time as a retailer dares to say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” at which time their full wrath is felt. By all means, sell big screen TVs for 30% off; just make sure you call it a “Christmas” sale and not a “Holiday” sale, or Bill O’Reilly will be all over your ass!
(It’s also worth noting that the cross imagery in the ad was not initially criticized by some liberal atheist Democrat, but by the uber-conservative Bill Donahue and by Baptist GOP candidate Ron Paul.)
Comment 12/19/2007
>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.
Or maybe he’s just sitting on a rotating stool and turning with the camera while he talks?
I think the cross was intentional, but the accusation the were building elaborate moving sets to do it is just silly.
Comment 12/19/2007
Or maybe he’s just sitting on a rotating stool and turning with the camera while he talks?
I addressed that explicitly in the following paragraph. (”put Huckabee and the camera on a rolling platform and roll it or rotate it”) It would have to be more than just him spinning on a stool - the camera has to move around him in a circle, and he doesn’t look like he’s doing the pushing himself. He’d also have to do it so that the cross and tree move to precisely selected positions, behind him, while he sits there, stealthily squirms his feet to move the stool without wiggling, and casually ad-libs an entire ad about Jesus to within two seconds’ accuracy, all without any preparation.
Nope.
I think the cross was intentional, but the accusation the were building elaborate moving sets to do it is just silly.
Hardly silly - that’s the way TV commercials are made. It’s commonplace (certainly much more so than the scenario above, which you yourself suggest is what happened).
Again, it doesn’t matter how the commercial was made - what’s startling is that they felt they had to lie about it.
Comment 12/19/2007
If you see the actual ad, you will see the cross does not glow at all. It is quite clearly a bookcase and unless you were looking for it I doubt you would see it. The online version has been severely tweaked to make the cross pop. Notice how dark the left side of Huckabee’s face is. Unless they were going for a satanic look, there is no way the scene was lit this way. The actual ad has normal production values, not film noir.
As for the shoot, even a short spot like this takes hours to block out and light properly. All of which would be done without the talent there. And in this case without needing a script. So it is completely reasonable that the crew and director were there setting up everything and then Huckabee showed up, got in his makeup, and delivered the speech. If someone wrote out the speech beforhand, there was a script. If he worked it out in his head sitting in makeup, then there was no script. But the complexity of the shoot is unrelated to the script.
Comment 12/20/2007
The controversy is all about hate that causes people to see things that normal people don’t see.
Comment 12/20/2007
Ted:
Normally, I’d be sympathetic to what you’re saying, but in this case, not so much. For starters, the ad (linked by the Huckabee campaign here ) has precisely the highlights you claim are “severely tweaked,” including the dark side of the face. In fact, if anything, it looks a bit more faded in the still above than in the video itself.
Secondly, as much as I hate agreeing with Bill Donahue about anything, I find it more than a little hard to believe that cross imagery in an explicitly Christian ad by a candidate who has built his entire support network by pandering to evangelical Christians, could be anything other than intentional.
Morris:
If you’re accusing Bill Donahue of being full of hate, we finally agree on something!
Comment 12/20/2007
good point. but if you see the ad on tv, you will see what i mean.
Comment 12/20/2007
Ted,
That’s completely plausible; YouTube sacrifices a huge amount of quality to its compression, even compared to the paucity that is TV. Also, gamma is all kinds of funky.
I’m quite happy to believe that it wasn’t meant to pop out quite so much. Then again, I have trouble believing that it wasn’t intentional that it was there. And the response seems… absurd. “[F]ound himself […] in front of a camera” and “ad-libbed” is about as plausible as me saying “But officer, I just happened to be in this tabernacle with a fire axe, and just happened to be practicing my ia-jitsu; I didn’t plan to desecrate anything.”
And to clarify for Fred, I mean that it’s not at all plausible.
Comment 12/21/2007
Oh, this is fun. Here’s a rather more sympathetic telling of the production.
It’s pretty obvious that the individual word choice was the only part not pre-planned.
(Full disclosure: I can’t actually stomach listening to some God-thumping blow-hard tell me that his
filogenocidal sky daddy is the reason some death cult stole the solstice celebration; I haven’t actually watched the ad being discussed.)Comment 12/21/2007
Dan M:
That story is just an amalgam of an AP ad-analysis (the first paragraph) and the Byron York story in NRO. It contains the line about how he “found himself” just happening to make a lil’ ol’ Jesus speech while the cameras just happened to be rolling.
Interestingly, the AP paragraph is the only version I’ve seen so far that corrects his ungrammatical first sentence (”Are you about worn out of [sic] all the television commercials you’ve been seeing . . .”), or even (implicitly) notices it. Usually that kind of stuff gets mentioned. Huckabee’s such a rube you can’t even get down to the level of his command of English.
Comment 12/21/2007
To anybody who claims it was an accident, have any of you actually ever held a real job?
Where I work, one of the things I’m (partially) responsible for is the production of our organization’s publications. If the cover of our organization’s annual report had any sort of religious symbol displayed that prominently on it, intentional or not, I think it is safe to say that it is at least possible I would be fired. Even if it was unintentional, it certainly registers as a horribly egregious oversight, again, the likes of which people can, and are, fired over.
Hey, who remembers the penis on the Little Mermaid VHS cover?
Comment 12/21/2007
“If the cover of our organization’s annual report had any sort of religious symbol displayed that prominently on it, intentional or not, I think it is safe to say that it is at least possible I would be fired.”
Be careful with bookcases and windowpanes.
Comment 12/21/2007