Neil Fabricant takes a break from Bloomberg and turns to health care for a moment:

I don’t watch Wolf Blitzer, but when a friend sent me the following video and I saw Alex Castellanos looking respectable and bemused, I just couldn’t believe that he was on the air and being presented as a respectable person.

I don’t know whether readers or CNN watchers know who Castellanos is. The friend who sent me the link didn’t mention it and so I assume he might be unaware of Castellanos’ background as the father of the attack ad, the Bush operative behind the Willie Horton ad, consultant to the McCain campaign, and probably the most notorious race-baiter in national politics, which is saying something when you consider the army of Republican operatives who vie for that title. Willie Horton remains synomous with race-baiting, but it was by no means the worst that Castellanos has been involved with. This is straight from Wikipedia:

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.

1994 Jeb Bush death penalty advertisement
Castellanos produced an ad in 1994 for Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Jeb Bush, who was seeking to unseat Democratic incumbent governor Lawton Chiles. The ad contains an interview with the mother of a 10-year-old female murder victim in which she complains that Governor Chiles had refused to sign the death warrant for the convicted killer, “because [Chiles was] too liberal on crime.” The Chiles campaign quickly answered that Chiles had not signed the warrant because the case was still being heard on appeal, which prohibited Chiles from acting, and local newspapers sprang to Chiles’s defense and accused Bush of lies and demagoguery.

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.

Castellanos later became an adviser to the McCain campaign.

Now Castellanos is advising the Republicans on their health care strategy. Knowing that his advice would get out to the public, he didn’t make the same mistake that Frank Luntz made. The Castellanos memo pretends that Republicans want to do something useful. But this excerpt shows the basic approach:

Language

We need to bring new language to this debate. If we paint the house the same color, no one will notice anything has changed: We will still be the same, outdated Republicans who have no new ideas and oppose everything. We have to bring something new to the game.

We tested new language on the survey.

The GOP Cause

Republicans are here today for a cause: We want to help families and businesses get a hold of health care costs and bring them down. Health care costs every family and every business too much. We all know that and we have to fix that. Republicans see a new and better way of doing it.

That’s why we are excited to join the growing number of Americans supporting the patient-centered health care reform movement.

We believe the patient-centered health care movement offers the best way to reduce health care costs, bottom-up, with patients and doctors in control.

The old, top-down Washington-centered system the Democrats propose will empower Washington to restrict the cures and treatments your doctor can prescribe for you.

Their Washington-centered system will end up costing trillions more, not less, and bankrupting the country. This is what they do - a trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon, our country ends up owing real money.

It’s time to look at health care reform in a new way.

The President sees the problem. So do we. He talks of making health care more affordable. So do we. But we have a completely different vision of how to fix it.

They want a Washington-centered plan.

We support patient-centered reforms.

They want a big Washington Experiment with our health.

We want common-sense simple fixes that will yield real results.

They want to start building a closed health care system where Washington decides how much money will be saved on health care by controlling the doctors you can see and limiting the treatments and cures your doctor can prescribe.

The patient-centered health care movement supports an open health-care system where patients and doctors make those decisions.

They want a top-down system where bureaucrats far away end up deciding what health care is worth paying for and what isn’t, and for whom.

We want a bottom-up, patient-centered system where control remains with your doctor and with you.

They want political and artificial cost-reductions from Washington.

We want to get politics out of health care not put more politics in. We want common sense fixes not politically driven experiments.

They want to empower a big Washington-run monopoly to control your health care.

We say monopolies are just not natural. Big monopolies are bad no matter who runs them, whether it is big government or big insurance businesses.

Ultimately, with their Washington-centered plan, you won’t be able to keep the things you like about your health care:

Obama’s plan will put government in charge of the doctors you can see and the types of treatment you can receive.

Obama’s plan will cut hundreds of millions of dollars from seniors on Medicare.

Obama’s plan will further bankrupt the country with trillions more in deficit spending.

Obama’s plan will raise a lot of taxes on middle class families and businesses. Taxing insurance, taxing sodas, even taxing health care benefits. It doesn’t matter if your insurance charges you more through the front door in higher premiums or President Obama charges you more through the back door in higher taxes. It’s the same thing. You are going to pay a lot more.

Obama’s plan will tempt your employer to dump you into a cheaper, government-run health care program. End of the day, it doesn’t matter who takes your private coverage away, whether it’s your insurance company, the government or your employer: When it’s gone it’s gone. You are going to lose your health coverage, and then you will see a reduction in the quality of your health care.

In a nutshell, getting government more involved is not going to reduce costs. It will extend wait times, limit what you can get, cost you coverage; raise your taxes and the deficit.

They tell us more Washington will make health care cost less. Really? Can we stop for a second and ask when Washington has made anything cost less?

The truth is the Obama-Pelosi plan doesn’t save money. Their Washington-centered plan, from Day One, costs a trillion more dollars.

Common sense tells us, something is wrong here: Saving money on health care shouldn’t be more expensive.

Slow Down, Mr. President

The Obama Experiment with our health could change everything we like about our health care — and our economy.

This big a risk, that risky an experiment is not something leaders on either side should rush through Congress in a few days or weeks.

This is 20% of our economy. This is our health care and our future. If we screw this up, it could last for generations. And Congress is trying to do this in two months! This should scare the living daylights out of all of us.

Slow down, Mr. President. We can’t afford to get health care wrong.

President Obama is experimenting with America, too much, too soon, and too fast.”

Key Message Point:

Even voters who support a “public plan” think Obama and Congress are moving too fast, with reckless speed, risking a huge part of our economy and our health care, when they don’t know what reform would really bring.

If we slow this sausage-making process down, we can defeat it, and advance real reform that will actually help.

Key Message Point:

We’ve got to SLOW DOWN the OBAMA EXPERIMENT WITH OUR HEALTH.

Alex Costellanos, one of the real lowlifes in American politics presented by Wolf Blitzer as someone whose positions on health care or anything else should be taken as anything but right wing propaganda.

CNN, the most trusted name in news.

Just makes me sick.

- Neil Fabricant