Obama to blunt Palin's impact

Pennsylvania - Barack Obama's campaign plans to employ high-profile female supporters in an effort to blunt Republican US vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's potential to persuade women to vote for her party.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano and Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius all were scheduled to campaign for Obama in the coming weeks. Republicans say they hope Palin, who made her national debut with a feisty speech on Wednesday, could put some female voters in play.

"We respect her. She's a skilled politician, as she proved last night," Obama strategist David Axelrod told reporters aboard the campaign plane on Thursday. "She's deft at going on the attack."

But it's not clear exactly how Obama and his running mate Joe Biden should respond. They keenly remember how women rallied around one-time Democratic front runner Clinton when they perceived she was a victim of sexism. They don't want to appear with a weak response, either, and certainly they also don't want to send independent women flocking to the Republican Party.

The solution, at least in the short term, will be to have top-tier female supporters vouch for Obama to largely female audiences and keep the candidate himself away.

Sebelius started on Thursday, linking Palin to the unpopular President George W Bush.

Clinton as a surrogate

"She mastered the words written by the Bush speechwriters and delivered them well. But what we didn't hear was what people talk to me about every day," Sebelius told reporters.

Clinton, a one-time presidential front runner, was set to arrive on Monday in Florida. Obama aides had long planned to have Clinton as a surrogate even before Palin was named.

Clinton's camp says the message will be honed on her long-standing appeal to kitchen-table issues that helped her win 18 million votes, but not the nomination. There are no plans for Clinton to directly engage Palin, largely because the election is about the president, not the vice president.

Obama's senior advisers say they cannot allow Palin to paint herself as the come-from-nowhere insurgent - a role that once belonged to Obama.

"For someone who makes the point that she's not from Washington, she looked very much like she'd fit in very well there when you see how she brings these attacks, they all felt very familiar to Americans who are used to this kind of thing from Washington," Axelrod said.

Obama himself dodged the question about how to treat Palin, only the second woman nominated as a major party's vice presidential pick and the Republicans' first.

'No significant achievements'

"I think she's got a compelling story, but I assume that she wants to be treated the same way that guys want to be treated, which means that their records are under scrutiny," Obama told reporters in York, Pennsylvania. "I've been through this for 19 months. She has been through it - what - four days so far?"

It was slightly more polite than Axelrod: "She tried to attack Senator Obama by saying he had no significant legislative achievements. Maybe that's what she was told."

The McCain campaign, keenly aware of the potential of their nontraditional pick, immediately used any criticism of Palin as a sign of sexism.

- AP