Huckabee is running an add wherein some people say that there is a floating cross behind him.

Even before I heard Huckabee’s official explanation, it looked pretty plainly like a shelf of some sort to me. I will say this about Huckabee: it the bookshelf were intentionally placed behind him and lit to subliminally reinforce his religiosity, he is a much more shrewd and creative man than I’d given him credit for being*. Given that when it comes to the role his religious convictions play in his politics he is about as subtle as a sledgehammer**, I find that very unlikely.

It reminds me a little bit of a movie that Clancy and I saw in Deseret called Latter Days, wherein a closeted Mormon missionary falls in love with a West Hollywood gay highlifer. Mormons don’t do crosses, so I was surprised to see subtle, Huckabee-bookshelf-like crosses sprinkled throughout the film. I thought to myself that the movie must have been placed in the hands of someone that was fairly ignorant of Mormon ways. In the commentary I find out that no, the writer/director, Jay Cox, was in fact raised Mormon. He actually comments on the Huckabee crosses as completely unintended. He’d in fact gone to the trouble of having actual crosses removed from the church scenes that the set manager had mistakenly put there.

The cross is such a basic design, I guess, that it’s hard to entirely remove. Nonetheless, Cox said he’d gotten many compliments by non-Mormons on the subtle inclusion of crosses throughout the film as a testament to his directing skill.

* – I suppose it could have been done by one of his handlers, but as near as I can tell up until the last few days it’s been a more self-directed campaign.

** – Not to knock on the guy too hard. I don’t have any particular disdain for the man. He’s a mix of good and bad, just like the rest of’em.