In the Right

The overriding flow of the traffic was not a conclusion, but a question -- is Castellanos the right man for the job? Mind you, the flow of traffic wasn't dominated by questions about Castellanos' skills as a producer of paid media -- on that front, his reputation is excellent -- but, rather, a more basic question: Can an ad maker be a good communications director?

To the outside world, the phrase "media consultant" is fairly vague.

To those who commit politics for a living, on the other hand, identifying oneself as a "media consultant" means one thing in particular -- it means, "I'm a guy who produces advertisements for television, radio, and direct mail. Tell me your strategic aims, communications-wise, and let me do my thing."

That's a very different job from serving as a communications director, where the fundamental role is two-fold -- certainly, a good communications director must think about how to present the campaign's message, but only after deciding on what the campaign's message should be.

It's like the difference between a brain surgeon and an ophthalmologist -- both of them worry when a patient cannot see properly, but one of them is primarily concerned with ensuring that the patient's sense of vision is intact, while the other is also concerned with that ... and a lot more, too.

Hence, the questions -- is an ad maker the right guy to be serving as the RNC chairman's "senior communications advisor?"

I think, to be fair, that that question has different answers -- some ad makers I've worked with couldn't come up with a message if their lives depended on it, while others are really communications directors who found out early in life they could make a lot more money as media consultants producing paid advertising, and decided to treat their wives and kids to much better lifestyles by eschewing the directing of communications.

Based on my experiences with Castellanos, I'd put him in the latter camp.

On the evening of Monday, September 11, 2000, for instance, I had just gotten home from the office -- I was then serving as the RNC's press secretary -- when I got a call on my cell phone from Ron Fournier of the Associated Press, asking if the Republican National Committee was using subliminal advertising in its anti-Al Gore television advertising. My initial response was to laugh off the query with a simple denial, "No, of course not," and ask what led to the question, to which Fournier replied, "I've been with the Gore team all day, and they're doing cartwheels right now, because they think Rick Berke has a piece on tomorrow's front page accusing you of doing just that."

The story, he told me, would allege that an anti-Gore ad on health care reform deliberately flashed the word "RATS" on screen for one-thirtieth of a second, against a voice-over saying, "The Gore prescription plan: bureaucrats decide."

Rick Berke was the national political correspondent for The New York Times -- like Fournier, a Big Foot. If he was running with a story accusing the RNC of using subliminal advertising, my next several days at the office were going to be ... interesting.

I assured Fournier that I had no knowledge of any deliberate use of subliminal advertising, and said I would get to the bottom of it and get back to him.

I called a friendly reporter at the Newspaper of Record, who confirmed to me that indeed, Berke's story accusing the RNC of subliminal advertising was slated for the next morning's front page.

I called my boss, RNC communications director Cliff May, related my conversation with Fournier, and was assured that May knew nothing of subliminal advertising. We decided I should call RNC chief of staff Tom Cole, both to give him the heads-up on the next morning's Times story, and to get direction. Cole, too, knew nothing of subliminal advertising, and told me to track down Castellanos immediately -- a task made somewhat more difficult, I was shortly to learn, when I discovered that he was in Michigan (I think it was Michigan, anyway), testing new TV spots in front of focus groups.

I was finally able to get word to Castellanos late that Monday night that he was authorized to use whatever means necessary, including chartering a flight if he had to, to get himself back to Washington by 7 AM Tuesday morning, where he would be meeting with then-RNC Chairman Jim Nicholson and his senior communications staff to discuss how to respond to the Berke story.

The story went online on the Times' web site later that night. I read it and re-read it, and began writing questions for Castellanos.

The next morning's meeting was not the most pleasant meeting I've attended. Suffice it to say that, because I was the guy at the RNC who had more contact on a daily basis with national reporters than any other individual there, and therefore had a deeper knowledge of what was on any given reporter's mind and desk at any particular time, I was cast in the role of prosecutor, and Castellanos was cast in the role of defendant.

I went at him with everything I could think of -- and everything I thought the press could think of. He replied calmly and fully and conversationally, and -- even though his contract with the RNC and, for all any of us knew at the time, his entire future in GOP politics was on the line -- he made a believer out of me.

The one-thirtieth of a second that the word "RATS" was on screen, he explained, was one frame of an ad. He explained that he had a computer software program that could freeze the frame and zoom in, either manually or automatically, and then bounce around the confines of the screen, in what Castellanos called "a visual drumbeat." It was simply a means to make the images on the screen more visually arresting. His editor had set the software to zoom in and bounce automatically for six frames -- one-fifth of a second. The phrase zoomed in on was "bureaucrats decide."

There are 18 characters in "bureaucrats decide," including the space. The letters "rats" happen to be in the exact middle of the phrase -- there are seven letters before "RATS," and seven letters (including the space) after it.

So on one of the six frames, the software zoomed in on the exact middle of the screen, and the four letters that showed up were R-A-T-S.

I wasn't the only one who became a believer -- the rest of the room, too, was convinced. We decided to counter-attack, to put him on television as soon as we could, to move from defense to offense.

Back then, there was only one television show that every political junkie and producer and booker and reporter and editor and publisher watched -- CNN's "Inside Politics," hosted by Judy Woodruff and Bernie Shaw.

We booked Castellanos for the show, tuned in, and watched him turn the tables. By the end of his appearance, the story was dead, and a senior GOP communications strategist had been given a one-on-one opportunity to beat the crap out of Al Gore for 12 minutes at the top of the most important political news TV show in the country.

Castellanos turned a negative into a positive that afternoon. And he turned a skeptic into a fan.

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