Locked Away Palin Rehearses Her Big Moment

The Republicans last night went to war against what the campaign manager, Rick Davis, yesterday described as "frenzied scrutiny" of Sarah Palin by the media as Palin spent a third successive day shuttered in her hotel suite in Minneapolis. She has given only one interview - to People magazine - since being named as John McCain's running mate.

During her sequestration, Palin has been coached by senior campaign aides on McCain's policy positions, and has been honing the delivery of her address.

Davis told the Washington Post yesterday that the speech prepared for the vice-presidential nominee - evidently before McCain had made his choice - was "very masculine". Once Palin got the nod, he said, "we had to start from scratch".

Other aides said that last night's advice would depart from Palin's introductory speech last week - when she called herself a "hockey mom" - and would focus instead on her record as a reform-minded governor of Alaska and as an authority on energy. Until then, it was left to the campaign to beat back critics, and blunt the potential fallout from further revelations about Palin's background and family life.

Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, led the charge yesterday, trying to link his record of governing a city of 8 million with Palin's experience as steward of a town of 8,000. In an interview with CBS, Giuliani argued Palin was more qualified to be president because she had been a governor and run a budget.

He added: "Has anybody ever asked Barack Obama, can you bring up your two kids and be president of the United States? They are asking, 'Can she be vice-president and be a mother?' Come on."

As scrutiny of Palin intensified, Time magazine reported that as mayor of Wasilla, she had tried to sack a local librarian for refusing to ban certain books.

"The greatest opening we have in this election is that there are many disaffected Democrats who are seriously considering voting for the McCain-Palin ticket," Davis said in a conference call yesterday.

The campaign is also confident of support from rightwing Republicans, who have abandoned their usual opposition to pre-marital sex to embrace Palin's pregnant daughter Bristol as a heroine to the anti-abortion cause.

There was also sensitivity that continued discussion of Palin could damage her image outside the convention hall - even though the Democrats say the controversy was an asset to McCain because it distracted from the ailing economy.

"I guess I don't blame them. Because if you don't have any issues to run on I guess you want it all to be on personality. And if you've got George Bush's track record and John McCain voting 90% of the time in agreement with George Bush then you probably don't want to talk about the issues," Obama said during a campaign stop at Kent State University in Ohio.

In a brief exchange with the Guardian yesterday, McCain's spokesman, Tucker Bounds, said he would not address any questions about Palin's travel within the US without reference to Obama. "Before I begin to process your question, will you please let me know how many states Barack Obama had traveled to before he started running for president - and which ones they were," he wrote.

The testiness even extended to Karl Rove, the mastermind of George Bush's election victories, who had suggested McCain's rationale for choosing Palin was winning the election, and not governing. "Karl's wrong," snapped Steve Schmidt, a senior campaign adviser, on CBS yesterday. "She's been under vicious assault and attack from the angry left."