Call that a woman? A gun-toting, vehement anti-abortionist with the hide of a grizzly bear draped over her sofa, who was so aggressive on the basketball court that she was nicknamed Sarah Barracuda? She makes Barack Obama look like a girl.

Call her inspirational? A former winner of beauty contests and runner-up in Miss Alaska, whose kids are named after a suburb (Willow), a salmon fishery (Bristol) and a high-school track?

Call her a “mom”? The mother of a pregnant, unmarried 17-year-old daughter, presumably going through one of the tougher periods of her life, who decides at that point to run for president and make the teenager vulnerable to the scrutiny of the entire world? Gee, mom, thanks.

Yes, she is running for president, Sarah Palin. Any deputy to a 72-year-old man with four bouts of cancer behind him has to be seen as doing just that. If politics is soap opera, here is the Hollywood movie: she's tough, she's beautiful, she's a “mom”, and she's headed for the White House.

Mrs Palin may be a feminist (you can hear, by their silence, old leftie feminists grappling with the concept of a “Feminist for Life” anti-abortionist, the group that Mrs Palin belongs to) but there is little feminine about her. She may be the supermum who can “just put down the BlackBerry and pick up the breast pump”, as she put it - but there's nothing maternal in flinging a vulnerable teenage daughter at the flashlights of the world. It's the sort of self-interested decision a softer “mom” would not make.

If someone is to present womankind on the international stage, please let it not be Mrs Palin. Please not her, I think.

Or part of me thinks. For even as I think it, another part of me cheers.

There was that cool observation when her nomination was first suggested: “What is it exactly that the vice-president does all day?” There speaks, gloriously, a working mother.

Somewhere inside me is another person who glories in this woman. I hate her beliefs, but I love that she has the guts to hold them. I hate her campaigning against abortion, but I love her personal decision to have the baby with Down's syndrome. I hate her steering her pregnant teenage daughter on to the world stage, and apparently giving her no choice about having the child and marrying the father, but I love that thing she said after her son Trig was born with Down's: “I'm looking at him right now and I see perfection. Yeah, he has an extra chromosome. I keep thinking: ‘In our world, what is normal and what is perfect?'.” (And Trig came in handy too for hiding Bristol's bump when the family posed for pictures at the announcement of Mrs Palin's run.)

Strange hybrid of a woman. I love her beehive hairdo and glasses, the sexy librarian look. I hate that her daughter is a cheerleader - but I love the way that Mrs Palin took John McCain shopping for a cheerleader outfit for her daughter on the day that her candidacy was announced. What zest.

She is such a mass of contradictions, that alone may qualify Mrs Palin as all woman after all.

While I revel in her as a character, an extraordinary creation scripted uniquely in the US, still I would hate to see her in the White House. And that's the problem. What Mrs Palin represents is mesmerising this side of the Atlantic for its very political incorrectness.

So sick are we in Britain, with our centre left-centre right politicians of the centre, not one daring to have a view out of line with the very thin consensus that passes for acceptable opinion here, that we stand stunned by a woman who opposes abortion and shoots moose; who believes in creationism and drilling for oil in the Arctic wildlife refuge; who supports the aerial shooting of wolves and opposes same-sex marriage; who says to hell with the kids and just get back to work; who even campaigned against saving polar bears!

Could you be less politically correct than suing the Federal Government to prevent it making polar bears an endangered species because the move would restrict oil drilling?

Nothing like Mrs Palin has, could ever, be seen in the British political system. She turns liberals into conservatives and conservatives into feminists. Stand back, Mr Obama, a new character is storming the ratings.

How Hillary Clinton, all safe lines and patronising empathy, must be hating it. How fast Michelle Obama must be recalibrating her soft little tales about baking cookies and enjoying The Brady Bunch. Mrs Palin would eat Carol Brady for breakfast, and still have space for some moose stew. Hell, yes.

But the Sarah Palin Story is not just a show and in America, they are equally agog but not aghast - they are adoring. The American Right loves this woman. They would have her in charge of the country.

Seriously. And that is where the trouble starts. A far-right fundamentalist creationist in charge of the United States? No. Not even for the fun and the glory and the sheer spectacle of it all. Not even for the joy of seeing that beehive and specs sex appeal on our television screens every day. Not even, sadly, for the triumph of seeing a woman, a working mother of young children, in the White House, magical though that would be.

And no, not even for the magnificent scene where Mrs Palin squares up to puny President Putin with his guns and his tiger hunts and his laughably macho outfits.

They call it feminism, but the Republicans have done women a disservice. They have selected a female candidate who is a cartoon - the joker in the pack who will end up just a joke.

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