Alter told them all that.
Then he said, however ..... there is a way out for Republicans. They can nominate someone with real experience, a solid record as a legislator and Washington Insider, someone that Everybody Takes Seriously. They could nominate for 1996 a rock-solid candidate ..... in BOB DOLE. Dole, you see, had what conservatives never do .... Dole had ..... gravitas!
Well, guess what?
Clinton had, with his Chinese reptile money, performed his '96 campaign issue research between April and July '95, working exclusively in what are called "C" markets like Jacksonville, Mississippi, and Paducah, Kentucky. He and Dick "Dicky Toe-Sucker" Morris had focus-grouped, polled, and test-run various ads and pitches, trying out the technique e.g. of "bracketing" Bob Dole with Newt Gingrich, to see if they could hurt Dole that way (answer: yes), Gingrich having been mauled for months on end with every slimy story the 'Rat Underground could dig up and put on Page One of TIME, Newsweek, and all the major papers, as well as 'Rat assets like ABC News.
So what are the odds that, by the time Jonathan Alter wrote his article booming up Bob Dole, Alter did not know that Clinton and Morris had established that Bob Dole was Clinton's best matchup?
Alter is almost a perfect negative weather vane for conservatives. Practically everything he writes is a partisan lie.
“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”
—NORMAN THOMAS