Not at all doubting your post but I would be very happy if you could link me something explaining how the Clintons manipulated the GOP into nominating Dole?
It probably isn't online since it occurred just before heavyweight online archiving became the rule, but you can find it in the stacks, and the smoking-gun articles (you have to connect the dots) may be found in Newsweek's and TIME's online archives.
Start with the after-election "explication"/"how he did it" stories run by TIME and Newsweek the week after the 1996 election. There was a lot, just a ton, of strategic info in there that, had the Republicans had it four or five months earlier when the journo's got it, might have made them think twice about carrying through with nominating Dole, and the info might have made Dole rethink his plans to resign his senatorial seat in April or May, I think it was, to run for /accept the nomination. The info was held for weeks or months, I think it's safe to say (you may infer differently, it might have come from election-night crowing by Clintonistas like Dick Morris), and it shows quite plainly that
Dole never had a chance. Not one. Not for one, eensy-teensy minute.
To the question of how could the Republicans do this, one needs to repair to the aforementioned Newsweek byline column, which always has run at the front of each issue, by Jonathan Alter. His essay about nominating Dole and the Republicans' regaining their dignity and gravitas (after having insulted the nation's intelligence by advancing Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America" and listening to non-serious non-persons like Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham) appeared iirc in August, 1995. There were four issues of Newsweek per month (all right, 4.3), so his piece appears in one of those issues. Read Alter's pitch, keeping firmly in mind the knowledge of Dole's loss for the reasons stated in the post-election stories and the fact that Alter must have known about these Dole liabilities, and then speculate whether Alter knew about the Clinton re-election campaign's confidential "C-market" test-marketing, keeping in mind again that the major media had been cooperating in a huge "scorched-earth" press campaign to discredit leading Republican personalities from the minute the 1994 election-night returns had come in, beginning with the infamous "Man of the Year" cover Newt got, with the odious "green-and-red Jello" hate-fetish cover photo of Newt.
If you have any doubts about the coordination, scope, inclusivity, and intensity of the press's campaign of destruction, go into Media Research Center's archives (mrc.com) and have a look through Brent Bozell's 1995 archive at his articles describing how he anticipated the campaign and tried to talk sense to major Republican conservatives about how bad it was going to be, and their tendency "not to get it" until they actually saw it in action, after which he describes their reaction as having been somewhat stunned by the fierceness and hatefulness of the "average journalists'" trashing of what the GOP leadership in Congress was trying to do. Another Jonathan Alter column from about this time -- I think it ran in 1994 or 1995, and I have gone back and looked for it in library microfiche and microfilm files w/o success (please let me know if you locate it, I'd appreciate a pointer) -- described the press campaigns underway during the first two years of the Clinton Administration. This column is a Rosetta Stone to understanding your daily news coverage -- this column and the Columbia School of Journalism annual survey data showing levels of political motivation among their entering freshman journo students (it went up all through the '50's and '60's as young liberals crowded into the profession in order to help ramrod "change the system" personal => group agenda). Together the data and the Alter menu of political initiatives (from gay rights and environmentalism to gender feminism and socialist goals like sovietizing medicine) show in gross and in perspective the sweep of the liberal attempt to destroy the Jacksonian American meme, which was originally the Jeffersonian and "antifederalist" (liberty interest) meme, and replace it with a frankly hostile, Fabian, "Eurosocialist" one.