The Obama campaign has no silver bullet to use against the Palin. Instead, Obama has decided to largely avoid directly engaging her and will instead keep his focus largely on John McCain and on linking the Republican ticket to President George W. Bush. The Obama campaign will leave Palin to navigate the same cycle of celebrity that Obama has weathered, and the same peril that her nascent image will be defined by questions and contradictions from her Alaska past.

Thursday, Obama and his senior aides cast Palin as little more than a surrogate for McCain and her party, leaving the more direct engagement to a newly prominent group of female surrogates. Chief campaign strategist David Axelrod called Palin a "skilled politician" who "had an assignment, and she went out and she discharged it."

"She is deft at going on the attack. For someone who makes the point that she is not from Washington, she looks like she would fit in very well there," Axelrod told reporters on the campaign plane in Pittsburgh. "These attacks all felt very familiar to Americans who are used to this kind of thing from Washington."

Obama also avoided directly engaging Palin and her criticism. "John McCain's running for president; I'm running against John McCain and as far as I can tell, I don't get a sense that Gov. Palin has ideas that are different from John McCain's," he told reporters in York, Pa., Thursday. "That speech she delivered was on behalf of John McCain and the essential question of this campaign is who's got a better plan, a better agenda to move this country forward and fundamentally change it from the economic and foreign policy failures that we've seen over the last eight years."

Obama also suggested that he'd be relying on the same press that has obsessively examined his life to pick apart Palin's. "You know the notion that any questions about her work in Alaska is somehow not relevant to her potentially being vice president of the United States doesn't make too much sense to me," he said. "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. I've been through this for 19 months. She's been through it, what, four days so far?"

Democratic strategists said a week of media obsession would bring out negative elements of Palin's record, her conservative positions on social issues, and stories contradicting some of her reformist claims.

"In a few weeks, voters will see pretty clearly that she's not remotely qualified for the job," said Jim Jordan, a Democratic strategist. "We'll understand her affinity for Pat Buchanan, and the pick will show McCain as cynical, panicky, impulsive and beholden to the wing nuts."

Democrats also noted Thursday that as Palin continues to attack Obama, she opens herself to harder coverage and more direct criticism. Republicans, though, were pleased to see that Obama hasn't found a way directly to engage Palin.

"They're like a lion tiptoeing around a turtle — they don't know what to do with it," said Republican strategist Kevin Madden, a former aide to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

And some Democrats suggested that Obama's inability to directly engage Palin would be a liability, and perhaps a mistake. "A failure to take Sarah Palin seriously will cost the Obama campaign," warned Democratic pollster Craig Charney, who said the campaign should be stressing Palin's "fairly extreme stance on social, environmental and energy issues," notably her view that women who have been raped should not be permitted to have abortions.

Obama himself may have little choice. He can hardly allow himself to be dragged into a debate with McCain's No. 2, and arguments about his experience versus Palin's only highlight the contrast between his limited time in government and the decades McCain has spent in Washington.

But Obama has begun to unleash a new set of surrogates — all of them women — to challenge Palin. In the primary, female senators delivered some of the Obama campaign's attacks against Hillary Clinton, providing a certain level of immunization against allegations of sexism or bullying sometimes leveled by Clinton backers.

This time, Charney suggested, female Democratic governors may be the most useful critics of Palin's record, and one prominent member of that group joined Obama's aides on a conference call Thursday morning.

"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," said Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.

Other women who support Obama, including Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar also took to the airwaves on Obama's behalf. Klobuchar was careful to preface her criticism with a mention of her own children.

"As a mom, I admire the way she's balanced the job of governor with her children," Klobuchar began. "But when you look at her record, and what she stands for, it's not going to be any deviation from John McCain, and I just don't want four more years of the same."

Aides to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton didn't respond to questions about Palin's speech, but she is expected to campaign for Obama in Florida on Monday.

Smith reported from St. Paul; Budoff Brown from York, Pa.