This kind of reminds me of all of the "advice" the left was lending the GOP after last year's elections - that they need to be more "centrist" in order to be "relevant". What a joke.
In 1995, Clinton sold his office to the Chinese for a lot of money (and other favors, like our neatest and bestest W-88 thermonuclear warhead design, and guidance technology suitable for MIRV'ing Chinese Long March ICBM's aimed at the United States).
Clinton took that money and, with Dickie "Toe-Perv" Morris, did a lot of test-marketing and focus-group work in "C" markets (Jackson, Mississippi, for example) "below the radar" of the GOP. He tested an array of pitches and opponents all summer and came up with his "right matchup": Bob Dole. Bob Dole would be the weakest candidate the GOP could field against Clinton.
In August, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter ran an essay the burden of which was that the GOP was on the verge of becoming a silly, irrelevant party in danger of "never being taken seriously again" or words to that effect, because of their embrace of conservatism and the Contract with America, which had given them their biggest electoral success since 1946. The antidote to that inchoate silliness, that gaping maw of press disrespect and perpetual "unseriousness"? Nominate Bob Dole. Bob Dole has experience, Bob Dole is a known quantity, Bob Dole has .... gravitas!
No, I'm serious, that's what Alter wrote.
Think he didn't know the results of Clinton's test polling and marketing?
Let us rest our case. If Pinchy loathes Sarah Palin, then we've found our woman, our Joan of Arc.