I was pleased to catch the first episode of Sarah Palin's Alaska before I left the US. It wasn't about Alaska at all, of course, despite being aired on an offshoot of the Discovery Channel, it was all about Sarah Palin. It was absolutely compelling, gold-dust television, and for all the wrong reasons (if you are Sarah Palin). The woman is beyond a joke.

Here was Palin playing the "mom" card, baking cakes with her nine-year-old daughter, a rude little girl who addressed her mother as "Sarah". Here was Palin forcing the same child, who was so frightened she moved on to her mom's knee, to fish near some fighting bears. "Cast the other way, honey." All for the cameras, so that she could admire this real "mama grizzly" and offer one of those ghastly home-spun platitudes along the lines of, "I tell my girls, you gotta fight in this life" (apologies, I was so gripped I forgot to take notes).

Then we saw the would-be president of the US trying to prevent her teenage daughter Willow's boyfriend from going upstairs, by pointing to the stairgate. "See this gate? It's not just for Trig, it's so no boys go up there." He promptly hopped over it. This is the protective mom who thrust her other daughter, then a vulnerable pregnant teenager, into the international limelight two years ago by running for vice-president and hoping nobody would notice the bump. And finally there was Palin, pretending she was a real outdoorsy huntin', fishin' and climbin' type - except she didn't catch a single fish, was petrified of the crevasses and when she was taken climbing she wailed and wailed about how she couldn't get up a bit of rock. It was pathetic and hilarious.

No time for Tea

Palin followed the opening of the show by declaring that she thought she could beat Barack Obama in 2012; her aides are said to be scouting for office space in Iowa, the first stop in the presidential primaries, and her latest book, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag, has just been published. Which is why I'm glad I caught the Alaska show - because if I hadn't seen it, Palin might have worried me.

Palin is attractive to a certain cadre of ignorant, insular, cartoon Americans, but she's too silly ever to win the presidency. This sector of American voters doesn't really have the upper hand, as the mid-term results this month showed. Despite boiling anger about the recession and Obama's failed bank bailout, despite high unemployment and the complete failure of the White House to communicate any clear advantage to ordinary Americans in the president's signature health-care bill, and despite the Democrats being perceived as dangerously off-centre, the Democrats still didn't lose the Senate and the Tea Party candidates didn't always win. The rout didn't actually happen.

Exit polls showed the proportion of voters fed up with the Republicans to be slightly higher than those fed up with the Democrats. Although they won a lot of seats, this wasn't a clear victory for the Republican Party, it was a repudiation of Obama. Time and again in the US I met voters, Democratic and Republican, who wanted a moderate, compromising government. It isn't so different from the way things turned out in Britain earlier this year; except that they don't have the Liberal Democrats holding the balance in the US.

So, yes, voters swung sharply to the right compared with 2008, but that is in part because turnout was higher among older voters (25 per cent of the electorate was aged 65 and above, compared with 19 per cent in 2008); it was higher among whites than blacks; and the ­disillusioned turned out strongly. Some 41 per cent of voters described themselves as ideologically conservative, compared with 34 per cent in 2008. But still the Tea Party didn't sweep the board, losing Senate races in Connecticut, Delaware, Nevada, Colorado and Alaska.

Half-baked Alaska

Alaska? Yes. Here is another reason to be hopeful: Lisa Murkowski. Murkowski is (barring an upset from an ongoing legal challenge by the loser) the Republican victor of a write-in campaign for the Alaska seat in the US Senate. A moderate Republican who says things such as, "I do not pass the purity test that the Tea Party has set out . . . there's a lot of people in Alaska that are anti-government but I think they would agree that the best thing is not that we shut government down", and, "I am not one of those who wants Barack Obama to fail. If he does well it means the country is doing well".

Murkowski's reasonableness lost her the primary to a Tea Party candidate, Joe Miller. Palin, a political and personal enemy of Murkowski, backed Miller - and he lost, after independents, Democrats and moderate Republicans united to support Murkowski in the first victory for a write-in candidate (one whose name does not appear on the ballot) in a Senate race since 1954.

Now Murkowski is taking on Palin. The day after the Alaska programme aired, Murkowski did an interview with the CBS superstar Katie Couric, coolly noting that Palin is in fact rarely seen in Alaska these days. She then offered the following comments about Palin as a potential president: "I just do not think she has those leadership qualities, that intellectual curiosity, that allows for building good and great policies. She was my governor for two years and I don't think that she enjoyed governing. I don't think that she liked to get down into the policy."

You're not kidding. On her programme, Palin watched her husband nail up 14-foot-high planks around her garden to block out the unwanted attentions of a biographer who had moved in next door. She commented approvingly that such barriers might give people an idea to consider for American immigration ­policy. She is that banal, and stupid - and as the result in Alaska and elsewhere showed, in the end, the American electorate is not.