Over the past few years, a cottage industry has grown up around preparing women to run for public office. Political parties, the federal Liberals for one, have outreach programs that promote the interests and rights of women and help them campaign. In Quebec, the provincial government has issued a primer on running in municipal elections, city-level politics being considered a useful port of entry to public life ( . . . )

If this is true, why is Sarah Palin the most popular woman in political life on the continent? Why do crowds line up to hear a woman who uses her astonishing ignorance of domestic and world affairs as a selling point? There's a lesson for women in Sarah Palin's meteoric trajectory from governorship of a remote, thinly populated state to vice-presidential nominee, and possible contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, but it's not one many women would want to learn. Wink and smile, treat anyone who knows anything as an elitist, play to Americans' deepest fears of modern life spiralling out of control even though they live in the most relentlessly modern country on Earth, offer them no alternative, no vision - and you're a star.

Palin wouldn't be such a problem if there were more women in public life. She's hardly unique in U.S. politics - U.S. history has no shortage of populists and self-promoters - but her elevation to stardom signals a downward shift in expectations for a woman in politics. For years following Margaret Thatcher's larger-than-life turn as British prime minister, a single mold was held out for aspiring women politicians - tougher than any man. However limiting that mold might have been, Thatcher was a leader whose mastery of policy was unquestioned. Palin is cut from a very different cloth. Plucked from political obscurity in a desperate move by Republican presidential nominee John McCain, Palin's less attractive traits were apparent from the start: a folksiness that would veer at a moment's notice into a vicious sarcasm; and an irresponsible willingness to come within a hair's-breadth of hate-mongering. Where there was genuine misunderstanding, Palin did her best to widen the rift. For the millions of Americans who are not evangelical Christians, Palin's "family values" were puzzling. Social liberals understood "family values" as the sanctity of marriage, making sex before marriage, as well as unwed pregnancy, wrong. Palin traded on this misunderstanding, turning a legitimate question into an abortion rights battle ( . . . ) .

What the men who sought her out thought, of course, was that she would prove an attractive, malleable presence to shore up a losing campaign. Unfortunately for them, it's been an exercise in Pygmalionism gone wrong. For women, it's worse. The most famous female politician in the world today is a vain and sanctimonious woman of boundless ambition and no vision. If anyone had wanted deliberately to undermine the presence of women in public life, they couldn't have chosen better than Palin.