Mitt Romney has sent a strong signal to everyone by hiring “Alex Castellanos, a veteran of presidential campaigns known for his tough ads against Democratic candidates.”
Alex is one of two or three people in the country who you don’t run a presidential campaign without,” said Dan Schnur, who was communication director for Senator John McCain of Arizona during McCain’s run for president in 2000. Schnur added, “You don’t hire Alex Castellanos unless you’re committed to this.”
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“Everybody on both sides would agree: When you’re saddled up and you’ve got Alex on the other side, you better bring your lunch,” said Jim Krog, who faced off against Castellanos when Krog ran the 1994 reelection campaign of Governor Lawton Chiles of Florida.
Castellanos is well known for producing somewhat controversial ads. He openly admits that his negative campaigning is his style: it works and that is what it is all about.
In 1990, Castellanos produced a controversial ad blasting Helms’s Democratic challenger, Harvey Gantt, who is black, for his support of racial quotas. The ad depicted a pair of white hands ripping up a rejection letter from an employer. “You needed that job and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority,” the narrator says.
Castellanos also produced an infamous television ad for Bush against Vice President Al Gore in 2000, in which the word rats was superimposed over attacks on Gore’s prescription drug plan. Castellanos said at the time that it was unintentional and merely a video editing quirk, but Democrats accused him — and, by extension, Bush — of using a subliminal derogatory message.
The result: highly negative campaign strategies in 08. Quite some people noticed that this year’s elections were terribly negative already. It seems that Romney is not willing to be the one to break this spiral of negativity.
I wonder what you all think of his chances of winning, at least winning the nomination of the GOP. And to our more conservative commenters I ask, Romney for President?
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