The Candidates' Christmas Ads

Along with the usual Christmas commercials for products and services, this year we have seen commercials for presidential candidates with Christmas/holiday themes.

Ads by Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani and Barack Obama have been on the airwaves, and political strategist Dick Morris took some time to discuss the ads on Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor" recently.

Of the Clinton ad, Morris says it was a "terrible" ad, in which Clinton was surrounded by gift packages, each bearing a tag that mentioned a specific issue, like "Bring the Troops Home," "Universal Health Care" and "Middle Class Tax Breaks."

But Clinton's ad was more generic than the others, referring only to the "holiday season" and making no specific mention of Christmas, for which Clinton was punished by the God-o-Meter.

Huckabee's ad was the "greatest ad," in Morris' words, "because we have to appreciate, politically, that Christmas is Huckabee's season." And the Huckabee ad, as the God-o-Meter points out, is the only one that mentions the birth of Christ.

Besides, the God-o-Meter already punished Huckabee this week after Bob Novak reported that the"elite evangelicals" who support Huckabee's candidacy are short of Southern Baptists.

"He did not join the 'conservative resurgence' that successfully rebelled against liberals in the Southern Baptist Convention a generation ago," Novak writes of Huckabee, a former president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention.

Novak says Baptists aren't on board with Huckabee, but other Christian conservatives are, particularly in Iowa.

Morris says the "Huckabee-Romney split ... mirrors the division between economic and social conservatives. The country club, upper income, Wall Street, business community is [for] Romney, the Joe Six-Pack, Christian right community is with Huckabee. That's the fault line that's running through it."

And Morris predicts Huckabee will win Iowa.

Like the Clinton ad, Obama's ad was punished by the God-o-Meter, as was Giuliani's. The God-o-Meter hasn't said anything about the Edwards ad.

But Morris says he liked the Obama ad, which achieves the "warm and fuzzy" level Clinton sought by showing Obama with his family. Morris didn't particularly care for Giuliani's ad, in which the former New York mayor (sitting next to Santa Claus) "lists those issues" of concern to voters, as Clinton's does. Edwards, Morris points out, "discusses" them in his ad.

Morris also says he believes the "anti-Hillary vote is coalescing around Obama." He predicts that Obama will win in Iowa and when that happens, much of the Edwards vote will gravitate toward him, leading to Clinton's defeat in New Hampshire as well.

And that could produce a new front-runner among the Democrats a little over a week into the calendar year.