Where do I begin?” Thus replied one senior Alaskan Republican when asked to comment on Sarah Palin’s latest eccentricity. Her decision to quit as Governor of Alaska with 18 months of her term still to go left him reeling. Amid all the speculation about her finances and her family and book deals and presidential runs and the bizarre reasons she gave for walking out on her job, where should he begin?

The same question presents itself when reviewing the state of the modern Republican Party. What with all the revelations about adultery, the regular resignations and defections, the talk show hosts hurling insults and the tone deaf response to the Obama honeymoon, I mean, where does one begin?

I’ve decided to begin with Jon Meade Huntsman Jr. In April Governor Huntsman of Utah was riding high. He was one of the most popular governors in the country, having been re-elected with 78 per cent of the vote. His popularity wasn’t a mystery. He is lucid, moderate, likeable, an accomplished individual with a good grasp of economics and the ability to speak fluent Mandarin. He has a strong business background and had been Ambassador to Singapore. During his tenure Utah was named the best managed state by the respected Pew Research Centre.

So Mr Huntsman’s name had just started to be bandied about as a possible candidate for the Republican nomination in 2012. Here was a man with real appeal outside the base, the only candidate from the centre. And the governor began to accept a few out-of-state invitations. In May, for instance, he was down to address Republicans in Kent County, Michigan. Nothing big time, a toe in the water, that was all.

And then, a few days before the event, Kent County Republicans announced very publicly that they were withdrawing the invitation. They had discovered that Governor Huntsman favoured civil partnerships between homosexuals. They did not want to be addressed by such a man. Two weeks later Barack Obama announced that he had offered Governor Huntsman an appointment as Ambassador to China. And he had accepted.

Mr Huntsman’s decision is a tragedy for the Right in America. But it is the right decision for him. Because he correctly divined that there was no point him seeking the leadership of the Republican Party. For the Republican Party already has a leader. It is Sarah Palin.

I don’t mean by this that Mrs Palin will be the next Republican nominee for president. She may not even seek that job. I mean, instead, that Mrs Palin now symbolises her party, that it is what she is, that it stands for what she stands for.

There is no more eloquent statement of modern Republicanism than resigning office with time still on the clock. Mrs Palin has chosen to talk about power, rather than exercise it. She would rather write a book and give lectures about being a governor than actually be a governor. And her party has made the same choice.

It has cast itself, deliberately, as the opposition, the angry outsider, and it is more comfortable in this role than it is as the party of power. As Rick Perlstein describes in his book Nixonland, being the party of the angry outsider began as an election strategy. Richard Nixon wanted to mop up votes that went to urban machine “law-and-order” Democratic mayors such as Richard Daley in the North and populist rabble rousers such as the segregationist Democrat George Wallace in the South.

Yet the anger of Nixon’s coalition has never quite left it, even after years of huge political success. They see themselves as the eternally frustrated rebels knocking on the barred doors of Washington DC, when they have been on the inside themselves for years.

One of Mrs Palin’s constant refrains when asked about giving up her office is that she didn’t want to practise “politics as usual”. Well, she can certainly be acquitted of that. And there is nothing wrong with unusual in politics from time to time. But for a party that seeks to govern to speak so openly of its dislike of governing, of the people who govern and of the place from which they govern, isn’t entirely serious.

Mrs Palin need not worry too much about this, because she has worked out that she can have an entire career, a public voice and a good income entirely by pleasing the Republican base. More broadly, her party has concluded that it can have a fine life just pleasing itself.

The maths of politics aren’t very complicated. If you want to win and you don’t have enough votes from people who agree with you, you have to win support from people who don’t by accommodating their views. You cannot win elections by getting the same people to vote for you by pulling the lever harder. This, however, is the strategy the Republicans seem to be embarking upon.

Push out people like Mr Huntsman, greet the defection of the moderate senator Arlen Specter with a shrug or even a cheer, ramp up the partisan rhetoric, handing leadership over to talk show big mouths. It all makes for the gaiety of life, sells books, builds radio audiences. But win elections? Forget it.

The great irony of the Republican appeal to its base, is that the people it is appealing to aren’t historically its base at all. The educated middle class, the business community, Republican voters for generations. What about them? The experience of the British Conservative Party is that trying to sack your voters — effete chattering-class liberals — and replace them with a new set — hard-working strivers — doesn’t work very well.

The final way in which Mrs Palin symbolises her party is in feeling sorry for herself. She has reason to feel aggrieved. She has not been treated well by the media. But which candidate for high office has? John Kerry? Al Gore? Gary Hart? Geraldine Ferraro? Michael Dukakis? The Right complains that Mrs Palin has been accused of one fake scandal after another. True. But what was Whitewater? American politics is a rough, rough game. And Republicans have played it to the full.

The central charge of American conservatives, almost their most important message, echoes that of Mrs Palin. The liberal media is out to get them. Perhaps it is even true. But if the media matters at all, then there is only one thing for it. The Republicans have to win round the liberal media. They have to build friends in it. They have to use it to win. Now that really would be an end to politics as usual.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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