Alex Castellanos

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Alex Castellanos

Alex Castellanos (* 1954 in Havana , Cuba ) is an American political activist and advisor.

Life

Castellano's parents Jose and Olga fled Cuba to the United States with him and his younger sister Laura in 1961. There Castellanos, who speaks fluent Spanish, grew up in the small town of Coats in North Carolina .

After graduating from the University of North Carolina , Castellanos turned to politics. Since the 1980s he has worked as a political strategist and campaign organizer for the Republican Party . To date, he has worked for seven US presidential candidates as well as a number of governor and Senate candidates . In total, he helped 9 senators and 6 governors into office. Castellanos appeared frequently as a representative of conservative / Republican positions in political talk and information programs on various American broadcasters, for example on CNN in programs such as The Situation Room (with Wolf Blitzer ), AC 360 (with Anderson Cooper ) and Larry King Live (with Larry King ); on MSNBC on shows like Hardball (with Chris Matthews ), on CBS on shows like Meet the Press .

Castellanos is currently working at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Controversy

White Hands Commercial (1990)

In 1990, Castellanos was involved in the controversy over the so-called White Hands commercial: it was a political commercial that Castellanos carried out during the Senate election map of 1990 on behalf of the election campaign of Jesse Helms , the Republican senator of the US state North Carolina produced. The spot, which each Helms African-American counter-candidate Harvey Gannt applied, has been switched several weeks in local channels of the state and owes its name to its visual composition: the spot shows the hands of a white man (Engl. White hands and the rest of the body is not shown), who crumples up the rejection of an application he has submitted to a company, while a voice from the off announces: “You are urgently dependent on this job. But it had to be given away to some minority. ”The commercial was criticized several times for being racist.

Pro-Death Penalty Commercial for the Bush Campaign (1994)

A commercial that Castellanos produced for the Republican governor Jeb Bush in 1994 during the governor's election campaign in the US state of Florida also caused heated arguments . The spot consisted of an interview with the mother of a murdered ten-year-old girl who complained that Bush's rival candidate, the Democratic governor of Florida, Chile, had refused to convict the execution warrant for the perpetrator's execution. Chiles responded to the attack by stating that the appeal process had not yet been completed and that he was therefore not entitled to have the sentence carried out. Newspapers and television stations then accused Bush of demagoguery and lying. After the election, in which Bush was narrowly defeated, many commentators blamed the negative reaction to the action for his electoral defeat.

Rats commercial for the Bush campaign (2000)

During the US presidential campaign of 2000, Castellanos produced a commercial for the campaign for Republican candidate George W. Bush , known as the rats mockery. In the spot, the then Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore's plan for reforming the prescription system for drugs was sharply attacked: next to a picture of Gore's, the word "rats" (rats) flashes for a fraction of a second before letters appear shortly afterwards to "bureaucrats" (Bureaucrats) is added.

The spot caused widespread outrage and was widely criticized as a systematic defamation of Gore. Castellanos defended himself by claiming that the brief fade-in of the "word syllable" advice was pure coincidence and that it resulted from the technical features of the commercial.

More campaigns

During the 2004 US election campaign, Castellanos produced various television commercials for Republican candidate George W. Bush . During the campaign, reportedly more than half of all campaign spending by the Bush campaign went through Castellano's Maverick Media company.

From 2007 to 2008 Castellanos was one of the leading figures in the election campaign of the candidate for the Republican presidential nomination Mitt Romney .

After Romney left the election campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Castellanos supported the ultimately unsuccessful Republican candidate John McCain .