Click here. Read on for the context of Peter Robinson's comment.
Trying to figure out what's going on in the Hawkeye state, I spent a few moments just now looking over Huckabee's campaign videos on YouTube. Without exception, they're brilliant—brilliant. In the ads in which he himself appears, Huckabee is engaging, warm, relaxed, and persuasive; the best I can recall since the Gipper himself. And the "surrogate" or "third-party" ads are almost as good. The "Switch to Huckabee" series adopts the lightness and cleverness of recent Apple ads; they're arresting, funny, hip. (That's right. An ad about a Baptist preacher is hip.) And the ad entitled "It's a Whole New Race" manages to be amusing and devastating all at once. Incomparably the finest ad of the season, "It's a Whole New Race" amounts to something a lot like a work of political genius.
Huckabee has also produced what some call the "Floating Cross Christmas Message" ad. Ron Paul doesn't like it, and quotes Sinclair Lewis, "When fascism comes it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying
a cross." Mark Steyn thinks "This 'Merry Christmas' thing is ingenius." Jonah Goldberg views the ad as "really quite deft." Rich Lowry says:
The more I think about it, that Huckabee ad may be the most subtly brilliant wedge ad ever. Per my e-mailer, it's bound to kick up a fuss, but in the ensuing fuss, Republican caucus-goers are going to side with Huckabee at least 80-20. So Huckabee is teeing
up a controversy that's bound to benefit him, at the same time he can plausibly say, "I didn't mean to kick up any controversy—I was just wishing people Merry Christmas." You can almost hear him saying it already. You've got to give him credit—he's nothing if not very shrewd.
Before that, Lowry wrote:
I think it's simply brilliant, if for no other reason than that—like his Chuck Norris ad—it's different and it's going to cut through the clutter. Also, because it projects an incredibly soft image of him, it's great implicit push-back against the Romney "contrast" ads. I've suggested that if Huckabee doesn't win the nomination, he'll be an important leader of the Christian right for years to come. Heck, if he doesn't want to do that, he can become a top-flight media consultant. A friend e-mails about how the ad works on another level:
Don’t know if you’ve seen it yet, but I agree with Geraghty that it is a pretty smart Christmas-season approach. But I wonder if the ad might be even smarter than we think? Already, Drudge is featuring sensationalistic headlines “Huckabee ad features floating cross!” and “Huckabee invokes Jesus!” Pretty soon, CNN could have stories about “Huckabee’s controversial new ad,” which will not only guarantee that the ad gets replayed ad nauseam (and for free!), the inevitable overreach by secularist types will strengthen the Huck-evangelical alliance, and also make Huck look awfully good to “church on Christmas and Easter” types for whom the PC “Merry Holidays” stuff grates.