Senator Barack Obama will increasingly lean on prominent Democratic women to undercut Gov. Sarah Palin and Senator John McCain, dispatching Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to Florida on Monday and bolstering his plan to deploy female surrogates to battleground states, Obama advisers said Thursday.

Clinton's campaign event in Florida, her first for Obama since the Democratic convention, will serve as a counterpoint to the searing attacks and fresh burst of energy that Palin injected into the race with her convention speech on Wednesday, Obama aides said.

With the McCain-Palin team courting undecided female voters, including some who backed Clinton in the primaries, Obama aides said they were counting on not only Clinton but also Democratic female governors to rebut Palin — and, by extension, McCain. Those governors include Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas.

Still, within the Obama campaign and among Democratic officials nationwide, talks are well under way about how the party should treat Palin in the campaign-— and what Obama and his running mate, Senator Joseph R Biden Jr, need to do to regain the offensive after the Republican convention.

Some Democrats were urging Obama's campaign not to underestimate the potential power of Palin's speech, even among voters not aligned with either party: On liberal radio talk shows and on left-leaning blogs, some Democrats said the Obama campaign should fight back hard to avoid being caricatured as Senator John Kerry was four years ago when he ran against President Bush. Some party strategists warned that Palin's personal narrative as a “hockey mom” with a special-needs child, would appeal to some undecided women voters.

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