As has already been noted, the Republican Party had nothing to do with the casting call.
Where was this noted?
There is an ambiguous statement, quoted earlier in this thread, by Brian Walsh of the NRSC in which he denies that the NRSC had anything to do with the casting call. That's obviously incorrect:
The NRSC is the National Republican Senatorial Committee -- a Republican group with the purpose of getting Republicans elected to the senate.
1. The ad in question was made at the request of the NRSC.
2. The ad in question was made by an agency hired by the NRSC.
3. The ad in question was paid for by the NRSC.
4. The casting call was done as part of the process of making the ad.
So obviously the NRSC did have something to do with the casting call. The casting call would not have taken place if the NRSC hadn't hired the agency to make the ad in the first place. When the NRSC, through it's spokesperson, says it had "
nothing" to do with the casting call, the word "
nothing" immediately leaps out as needing clarification.
(1) It's possible that Walsh is saying that no one connected to the NRSC had any involvement at all with the ad agency in between the time that the agency was hired to make and ad and the time that the agency delivered the ad for airing; that no one from NRSC looked over the work on the ad, such as reading the proposed script for the ad, or had any say at all in the work, other than accepting the ad when it was finished and paying the agency for their work.
(2) It's also possible Walsh is speaking much more narrowly, and is only denying that someone from the NRSC wrote the casting instruction. That would not preclude people from the NRSC having been aware of the casting call instructions. It would not preclude their having read the casting call copy and having seen no problems with it.
I think Walsh is trying to
imply he means the former. But the quoted statement doesn't actually say that. Of the two interpretations, I find the second to be more reasonable. I find it hard to believe that either the Democrats or the Republicans would simply hire an agency to make an expensive ad without giving being somewhat involved in overseeing what is being produced.
Nor can we know without more information whether the ad agency people involved in writing the casting call were Republicans. (That is, after all, what the thread title and the OP claim: that
Republicans dissed West Virginians.)
We do know that the ad agency people who wrote the casting call copy were hired by Republicans. They wrote that copy in the service of Republicans. They were paid by Republicans for writing that copy. Trying to completely deny Republican involvement in this is ridiculous.
The ad agency people were trying to do what they thought the NRSC wanted them to do; and they seem to have been successful in that. Until the text of the casting call copy was brought to light, the NRSC does not seem to have had any complaint about that copy and appears to have been quite satisfied with the work the agency did. So the obvious questions are: (1)
At what point did someone from the NRSC first see the casting call copy?, and (2)
At what point did someone from the NRSC first realize there was a problem with the casting call copy? Those are points Walsh could easily clear up if he chose to.
One can make the statement (if one chooses to accept Walsh as a reliable source) that the offending passage was not specifically written by a member of the NRSC. But if one wishes to go beyond that to a broader claim that "
the Republican Party had nothing to do with the casting call", one needs some evidence to support that. Walsh's statement does not provide that evidence.
