Barack Obama's 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, talks about Sarah Palin and NY-23 on the Meet the Press today.
DAVID GREGORY: What about Palin now? Is she a force to be reckoned with in 2012?
PLOUFFE: Well, I think we should thank John McCain for picking her in terms of how it helped us win in 2008, but I think we should doubly thank him now. What's going on in the special election in New York 23, I think, is a remarkable phenomenon and could affect our politics for years to come.
GREGORY: She endorsed the independent, more conservative candidate, and now we have the Republican candidate who stepped aside.
PLOUFFE: So a centrist Republican has been ridden out of that race. I think what you're going to see in the coming months, if not years, Sarah Palin is -- by the way, she's kind of play playing the role of pied piper in the Republican party, which is something I'm quite comfortable with.
So Sarah Palin, the other Republican candidates who are likely to run, the Limbaughs and Becks of the world are basically hanging a "Moderates need not apply" sign outside of the Republican National Committee headquarters.
And for a party that has historic lows right now because centrist and moderates are leaving them in droves, have catastrophic problems with younger voters, Hispanic voters, and African-Americans, it's a very curious strategy to repair this damage. So I think they are becoming more a very motivated core, but a small core of about 23% of the country.
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