The US Republican party has made a bad start showcasing its presidential talent as it begins to choose a candidate to run against Barack Obama next year. Its prime exhibit is Mitt Romney, who made his personal fortune downsizing companies, but whose current message – ironically – is "jobs, jobs, jobs". He joked to unemployed Floridians, that he, too, was unemployed. Few laughed. Or there is Michele Bachmann, who makes sense to the evangelical right, but sounds almost unhinged to many others. Her answer to faltering economic recovery? Close down the Environmental Protection Agency.

There is the pizza executive Herman Cain, who said he would not be comfortable with a Muslim in his cabinet, and the once politically potent Newt Gingrich, whose backers are heading for the door. There is Tim Pawlenty, who announced his intention to attack Mr Romney for a healthcare programme – which resembled the one that Barack Obama went on to create – when he was governor of Massachusetts; he ducked the opportunity during a debate in New Hampshire and regretted the fact he had done so afterwards. There is Rick Santorum, whose solution for 14 million unemployed was repealing healthcare reform and drilling for oil. As a test-tube sample of what is happening inside the party, the lineup is revealing.

This is a party that is still too angry with the incumbent president to think clearly about its electoral goals. If it were less consumed by its own narcissistic fury, the Republican party would have realised that its key target audience lies outside the comfort zone of tax cutting, small government and the supposed imminent arrival of sharia law. The party has to convince independents that it speaks to their central concerns, which are jobs and the economy. Above all, Republicans have to have a viable alternative plan for economic recovery. If Mr Romney had any idea of how to start getting America's 14 million jobless back to work, he would have acknowledged the effectiveness of the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, which saved 1.4m jobs and probably a whole industry from going under. But he attacked it as jobs for the unionised boys, without being honest enough to admit what would have happened if Detroit had been allowed to go under.

Because of the gains made by the Tea Party last year, potential candidates such as Rick Perry, governor of Texas, can make headway by threatening to withdraw his state from the Medicaid programme. Yet each one of his pluses to a Tea Party audience is a minus to a national one. This is not going unnoticed in the polls. It is early days in the campaign but Republican voters already distinguish between people they like and those they think would make good presidential candidates. Sarah Palin disappears completely through that crack while Mr Romney survives. If she decides not to run, his lead expands. The polls confirm one of the main lessons of the 2010 midterms – the toxicity of ultra-conservative candidates who saved the Democrats from a complete drubbing when voters last went to the polls.

Yet the party has not yet absorbed the lesson. It matters that the other candidates feel so vulnerable to far-right extremes that they cannot bring themselves to condemn Mr Cain for saying he feels uncomfortable with Muslims. Jon Huntsman, a former Utah governor expected to declare, Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty, all found reasons to absent themsleves from the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans on Friday – just as well for them, given the extraordinarily ill-judged but deeply revealing decision to allow an Obama impersonator to make racially charged remarks from the platform on Saturday. If the conference is a bellwether, the flock will go over a cliff. Yet it is not in any Democrat's interests that this happens. The national debate needs pragmatists, not people who indulge their grievances and parade their prejudice as badges of identity.