Alex Castellanos

Alejandro "Alex" Castellanos (born 1954) is a U.S. Republican Party political media consultant who specializes in television advertising, and was a top media adviser to George W. Bush's 2004 presidential campaign and Mitt Romney's 2008 presidential campaign.

He is a partner in National Media, Inc. and has served as a media consultant in numerous presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections both for campaigns and for outside political committees. In late 2008 he teamed with veteran Democratic Party strategist Steve McMahon to form Purple Strategies, a bipartisan public affairs firm. Castellanos has also worked on issue advocacy campaigns for corporations and national associations. He has been a frequent guest on political shows.

Personal background

Castellanos, a native of Havana, Cuba, is fluent in Spanish and English. His parents Jose and Olga fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba as refugees in 1961, came to the U.S. with one suitcase, two children and eleven dollars. He spent the remainder of his childhood growing up with his parents and his younger sister Laura Castellanos in the small town of Coats, North Carolina. A former National Merit Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Castellanos speaks frequently about politics and is a guest commentator on CNN. He has also been a guest on Meet the Press, Hardball with Chris Matthews, Crossfire as well as at numerous Universities including the United States Army Communication School. In 2008, Castellanos served as a Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics in the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Castellanos served as a key creative member to the Bush-Cheney 2004 election, producing many spots, such as the “Wolves” commercial that acquired much media attention. He has helped elect 9 U.S. Senators, 6 Governors, and has over two decades of political consulting experience, both in the United States and abroad.

Castellanos has served as media consultant to seven U.S. Presidential campaigns, including serving as a volunteer on the John McCain for President Ad Council during his run for President. He has been credited with the discovery of the political "soccer mom" and called "father of the attack ad.”^{[citation needed]}

Fortune magazine singled out Castellanos as a “new style media master” and GQ ranked him as one of the 50 most powerful people in Washington.

1990 "White Hands" advertisement

Near the end of the 1990 U.S. Senate race in North Carolina, Castellanos produced an advertisement for incumbent Republican Senator Jesse Helms, who was then trailing Democratic challenger and Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt, an African-American. The ad shows the hands of a white man crumpling a job application rejection notice as a narrator intones, "You needed that job. But they had to give it to a minority." The ad then references Gantt's supposed support for racial quotas and Helms's opposition. No other part of the actor's body is shown.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an expert on political communications, has written on the subliminal messages of racial fear encoded into this advertisement. She believes that the signals may include a screen transition showing the hand crumpling the image of Gantt's head and a black mark on the rejection notice in the shape of a hand holding a handgun.

2000 "Rats" advertisement

During the heated 2000 U.S. presidential campaign season, Castellanos produced an ad for the Republican National Committee attempting to discredit the prescription drug plan policy offered by U.S. Democratic Party presidential nominee and then-Vice President Al Gore. Alongside images of Gore, the ad showed the word "RATS" for a split second, before the complete word "bureaucrats" appeared on-screen. During the ensuing uproar, Castellanos claimed that the inclusion was "purely accidental." Psychologists suggest that such brief messages can be processed by the brain but at an unconscious or subliminal level.

2008 Romney campaign

In late February 2007, the Boston Globe obtained a leaked copy of an internal Romney campaign document describing the campaign's plan to win the Republican nomination. That document, produced by Castellanos, drew attention by implying the campaign's poor view of the sitting president. Specifically, the document advised that that Romney should create distance between himself and President George W. Bush by focusing on the separating factor of "intelligence."

Prior to joining the Romney campaign, it had been reported that Castellanos had met with Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson.

2010 BP campaign

In June 2010 Purple Strategies was reported to have been behind a television campaign for BP with the tagline "We will get this done. We will make this right" in which BP Chairman Tony Hayward apologizes for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and promises to take corrective action. The campaign reportedly had a $50 million budget.

University of Chicago Institute of Politics

On January 17th, 2012, Castellanos participated on a panel "2012: THE PATH TO THE PRESIDENCY" with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, David Brooks, Rachel Maddow, Alex Castellanos and moderated by George Stephanopoulos. David Axelrod's newly formed Institute of Politics hosted the panel discusion at the University of Chicago International House’s Assembly Hall. The panel focused on the 2012 presidential campaign and diagnosing the condition of American politics. At the end of the panel discussion and during the fielding of questions from the audience, co-panelist Rachel Maddow engaged Castellanos in a heated, but brief exchange about the form of government American voters for the future. Maddow took issue with the metaphors Castellano used to characterize the two choices Americans would need to choose for the different forms of US government. He specifically asks whether Americans would want a "US Army or Facebook" style of government. Maddow confronted Castellanos with the use of those analogies and asked for clarification.