In a recent Huntsman interview, Politico’s Jonathan Martin noted that his thinking resembles a “Republican brand of Clintonism: practical solutions, softened rhetorical edges aimed to appeal to the center and an overall modernization of a party badly in need of a new image.”   If you think this sounds like the tactics of a certain Eton-attending, bicycle-loving British opposition leader, you’d be right:

“I would liken it a bit to the transformation of the Tory Party in the U.K.,” Huntsman explained. “The defeat in ’97, John Major to Tony Blair, after years of strong, conservative rule with Margaret Thatcher setting the mark. They went two or three election cycles without recognizing the issues that the younger citizens in the U.K. really felt strongly about. They were a very narrow party of angry people. And they started branching out through, maybe, taking a second look at the issues of the day, much like we’re going to have to do for the Republican Party, to reconnect with the youth, to reconnect with people of color, to reconnect with different geographies that we have lost. You cannot succeed being a party of the South and a couple of Western states. It just – it isn’t long-term sustainable.”

Okay, so Huntsman is trying to do a David Cameron – get his party to embrace (or appear to embrace) a more moderate, compassionate platform in order to win over the demographics necessary to get into power. It seems to be working for Cameron -  so will it work for the Republican party?

Well, uh, no. At least not for a while. Not only is Huntsman seemingly alone among Republicans in his desire for Cameron-esque moderation, but his recent comments have led to him skipping CPAC – a Republican party get- together where potential candidates traditionally strut their stuff- because he feared he would be booed.  Indeed, Republicans appear to currently be under the command of extreme radio shock-jock Rush Limbaugh, who has openly expressed his desire to see Obama fail and whose keynote address went down a storm at CPAC.  When the Republican National Committee Michael Steele called Limbaugh “incendiary” and “ugly” last weekend, he almost immediately apologised to the radio host for his remarks.  As many noted at the time of Steele’s attack, if you have to insist to an interviewer that you’re the leader of the Republican party, then you’re probably not.   Finally, when favourite contender for the Republican presidential nomination Bobby Jindal gave his reply to Obama’s State of the Union last month, it was a speech straight from the playbook of the last eight years: government is bad, lower taxes are good.

The inevitable, incredible conclusion from all this is that despite the overwhelming political evidence of the public’s shift away from the right, the vast majority of Republican politicians think that the problem is that the party is too centrist and not being bold enough in declaring its right-wing beliefs.  So much so, in fact, that it’s probably going to take another battering in the 2010 congressional mid terms to make them think otherwise. This is not all that surprising: it did, after all, take eight years of being in opposition for the Tory party to begin the process of renewal under Cameron. Republicans, on the other hand, only lost Congress in 2006 and only lost the Presidency last November.  It’s therefore no surprise to see the Republican leadership going down the road of failed British Conservative leaders Michael Howard, Ian Duncan Smith and William Hague: appeal to the base & go extreme.

But at some point, will Republicans be left with no choice but to face the kind of modernising face lift that many believe Cameron has achieved with the Tory party? After all, history suggests that most parties thrown out of power don’t go too long without undergoing a  significant transformation back to electability. However, though such a rebirth may eventually be embraced by the party of Bush, the truth is they’re going to have a much harder task than the simple David Cameron analogy suggests. America is not Britain and if Cameron thinks he had a fight on his hands modernising the Tories, it’s nothing compared to the battle the likes of Huntsman is going to have if he thinks he can drag Republicans kicking and screaming into electoral contention once again. In part two, therefore, I’ll explore why the Cameron analogy isn’t quite as cute – or as accurate – as the Governor of Utah would like to think.