The book of Matthew calls on us to be as shrewd as serpents but as innocent as doves. That’s called strategic thinking.

Setting aside – for the time being – the Apple End User License Agreement, which Moses the Lawgiver himself couldn’t figure out, one of the most successful examples of strategic thinking in the political realm comes in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s new autobiography.

In excerpts published in Politico magazine this week, Sen. McCaskill outlines how she won her Senate seat – by helping the least electable GOP candidate win the primary. This is important for conservatives to take note of, even as the Republican primary is roiled by infighting and favoritism. Sen. McCaskill won because she thought strategically.

“Running for re-election to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat from Missouri, I had successfully manipulated the Republican primary so that in the general election I would face the candidate I was most likely to beat,” she wrote. “During the first week of July 2012, one month before Republicans nominated their candidate for the U.S. Senate, I directed my campaign to go into the field to take a poll of Republicans in Missouri. This was a first for me; never before had I paid $40,000 to a pollster to find out what was on the minds of voters who were never going to vote for me. But this election called for an unusual strategy.”

She found that Todd Akin was the most vulnerable candidate. So she helped him.

“I began to consider whether it would be useful to help Akin spread his message, keeping in mind that he was the weakest fundraiser out of the three potential nominees,” she wrote. “Akin’s track record made him my ideal opponent. Many of his votes in Congress contradicted his claim of being a fiscal conservative. While he opposed President Barack Obama’s authority to raise the debt limit, during the Bush administration, in 2004, he had voted to raise the limit by $800 billion.”

Other examples of clear and demonstrable hypocrisy made Akin vulnerable in Missouri, which still earns its reputation as the “show me” state.

The question for McCaskill was simply, “How could we maneuver Akin into the GOP driver’s seat?”

She spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to help Akin win.

“My consultants put together a $1.7 million plan,” she explained. “Four weeks out we would begin with a television ad boosting Akin, which my campaign consultant Mike Muir dubbed ‘Cup of Tea.’ The production costs were pretty low, about $20,000, because we didn’t have to film anything. We just used pictures and voice-overs.”

In fact, she notes, “we spent more money for Todd Akin in the last two weeks of the primary than he spent on his whole primary campaign.”

It worked. Missouri Republicans elected Akin as their nominee. And he was such a weak candidate that Claire McCaskill easily won re-election.

The lesson here for conservatives is that strategy matters. They should think about that, as they help choose a GOP nominee for president.