Christmas Cheer, Campaigns an Awkward Mix For Iowa Voters

(By Mark Hirsch -- Associated Press)

For those who do caucus, the Christmasization of the campaign threatens, in turn, to politicize Christmas. Take Marcie Hagge, a teacher in Cedar Falls, who says she'll host the usual family bash with the traditional dinner of chili and oyster stew (which she assures us are two entirely separate pots of food). She has family members arriving at her home not only from all points of the compass but also from all wavelengths of the political spectrum.

"It's a new phenomenon," she says of the Christmas/caucus overlap. She'll keep things civil, even if her brother, Ron, the Republican, says something she disagrees with. In Iowa this year, she says, "A lot of decisions are going to be made around the Christmas table."

But not at Judy Estabrook's house. Estabrook, another Democrat, will also have a big family get-together at her home in Waterloo, but she'll have a strict no-politics rule. "I have a son that gets belligerent. He's a hard-core Republican."

There's a general assumption that attack ads don't work well in Iowa in general, and that may be doubly true in this season of peace on Earth and good will toward men. The rules are likely to change at about 12:01 a.m. Dec. 26.

For now, many candidates have adapted to the calendar by Christmasizing their ads on TV and the Web, with varying degrees of solemnity and campiness.

In the campy category would be Rudy Giuliani's ad, in which he wears what one assumes is a borrowed bright-red sweater vest, and vows to give everyone not only a safer America and lower taxes but also "a really nice fruitcake with a big red bow on it."

Fred Thompson's holiday ad has no narration at all, just still images of U.S. soldiers serving abroad as a piano renders a poignant "We Wish You a Merry Christmas."

Sen. John McCain's ad recounts how a compassionate North Vietnamese prison guard approached him and, without saying a word, drew a cross in the sand one Christmas while he was a prisoner of war.

Barack Obama's warm and fuzzy ad features his wife and adorable kids, a Christmas tree, a fire in the hearth (looks like gas and not real wood) and the candidate's central campaign theme that "the things that unite us as a people are more powerful and enduring than anything that sets us apart."

Clinton's ad shows her with Christmas presents, onto which she is slipping envelopes labeled "Universal Health Care" and "Alternative Energy" and so forth. "Where could I put 'Universal Pre-K'?" she asks, before discovering precisely the right package.

But no Christmas ad has generated as much interest and controversy as the one from Huckabee, a kind of visual Hallmark card in which the candidate talks directly to the camera about celebrating "the birth of Christ." The spot incited much Internet buzz about whether it contains a subliminal image of a cross in the background.

Huckabee counterattacked, saying at a speech in West Des Moines that the controversy "has revealed to us just how far we've slipped in our culture." He also joked that if you play the commercial backward, it says "Paul is dead" (a reference to the '60s-era rumor that Beatles lyrics and album images had coded messages about the death of Paul McCartney).

What has resonated with many Iowans is that in the ad Huckabee doesn't say the all-purposed secular greeting "Happy Holidays" but rather uses the words "Christ," "God" and, most important, "Merry Christmas."

Mike Waggoner, a professor at the University of Northern Iowa who edits a journal on religion and education, says of Iowans, "I know they find it refreshing for someone to say, 'Doggone it, Merry Christmas.' "