Mike Huckabee’s new TV ad is only his second, and it’s dramatically different from his first. That ad, which had Chuck Norris endorsing Huckabee, virtually mocked the very idea of such an ad (though maybe that’s the only way the ad could have been done). The new ad has no humor. It means business. It pitches to the kind of voters mostly responsible for Huckabee’s surge into second place in recent Iowa polls – evangelical and Catholic conservatives. And it does so by offering Huckabee as a man of faith who will not – in contrast to unnamed others running against him – compromise on life and marriage issues. “Faith doesn’t just influence me,” is how the ad begins, with Huckabee talking. “It really defines me. I don’t have to wake up every day wondering, ‘What do I need to believe?'” And what he believes, as the ad makes clear, is that life begins at conception and that marriage is the union of a man and a woman.
