ALEX CASTELLANOS

During the 2000 Bush-Gore race, Alex Castellanos -- sometimes admiringly dubbed the “father of the modern attack ad” – produced an ad for the Republican National Committee which was, of course, critical of Gore-Lieberman and Gore’s prescription drug plan. But the ad gained notoriety because, alongside an image of Al Gore, the letters “r-a-t-s” appeared about a half-second before the rest of the letters in the word “bureauocrats”. (Most psychologists believe that such brief, almost unconscious message can be processed and retained. This is sometimes referred to as subliminal messaging.)
Castellanos chalked the “rats” message up to an oversight.
If the “rats” message was intentional, it may not have been Castellanos’ first foray into subliminal advertising.
In 1990, he helped produce a spot for then U.S. Senator Jesse Helms which has since become known as the “white hands” ad. In the spot, a white male is rejected for employment because the job was given to a minority in accordance with affirmative action laws. (Republican Helms was facing Democrat Harvey Gantt, the Charlotte mayor who many were predicting would upset Helms. Gantt, who is black, had advocated racial hiring quotas.)
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications expert who has authored a book on negative advertising, said the ad features subliminal messages intended to inflame racial fears.
“The evaluation of visual symbols is extremely tricky,” Jamieson told a PBS interviewer for a report on campaign advertisements. “But there are two things about that ad that are worthy of discussion. The first, when you look frame by frame at the ad, there are frames in the ad in which the hands are crushing the head of one of the candidates. And I reproduce those pictures in ‘Dirty Politics’.”Secondly, there is a black mark on the letter that's shown in the ad that is supposedly the rejection letter that a blue collar worker has just gotten telling him that he hasn't gotten the job and the ad's implication is that it was given to someone who was an unqualified minority. Well, when talking to people in focus groups about the ad, first most people didn't recognize that at almost an imperceptible level there was the hand appearing to crush the head of the candidate. But a number of people did see that and when you point it out to people they do see it. Now we don't know what that does to audiences. But it's interesting that it's there. Secondly, there's a black mark on the paper. And when you ask Castellanos how did it get there, he says, 'I don't know it's just a piece of paper we picked up.' But there are some people in some focus groups who see that as a black hand holding a black gun. Different people bring different meanings to different symbols. We don't all respond to the same message in the same way. ”The question becomes for an ad like that, is that ad subtly activating racial fears? Illegitimate fears that are not about the explicit content of the ad, but are about something else. Or were those just production accidents that elicited that unintended response in some members of the audience.”
For his part, Castellanos never shied away from defending the ad. “I'm very proud of it,” he told PBS. “I believe every bit of it. You know, my name is Castellanos. My son is named Castellanos. It may be, you know, one day he could get a job or he could get some deal because he is of a some ethnic minority and all of that. I hope he never does. I think that lessens you when you do that.”
Castellanos is currenty working on the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney.