ST. PAUL, Minn. -- As Sen. John McCain looks ahead to the November election after the Republican National Convention, the Obama campaign plans to send out some high-profile female supporters, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, to blunt Sarah Palin's potential to draw women's support to the Republican ticket.

Video: 'I Accept' | RNC Coverage

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius all were scheduled to campaign for Obama in the coming weeks.

Republicans said 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 Thursday. "She's deft at going on the attack." (Video)

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

"She mastered the words written by the Bush speech writers 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 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 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.

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

McCain accepted his party's nomination for the presidency Thursday night and sought to define his life's story arc as that of a selfish Navy aviator who grew to be a selfless public servant because of his five years imprisoned during the Vietnam War. (Video)

Interrupted frequently and often raucously by chants of "country first," and "USA, USA," McCain said that by the time he emerged from captivity in 1973, "I wasn't my own man anymore, I was my country's." And he asserted that, unlike his Democratic opponent, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, "I know how the world works. I have the record and the scars to prove it. And Sen. Obama does not." (Transcript)

He spent relatively little time attacking Obama, however, and when he did he focused mostly on questions of policy. He charged Obama with supporting abortion and wanting to raise taxes, close markets, increase government spending and hinder small businesses. And he criticized Obama's energy, health care and education policies. (Interactive)

Iowa delegate Bill Northey said it didn't surprise him that McCain spent so little time running down the Democrat.

"John McCain has all the credentials he needs to take the country forward," Northey said. "He's a serious man with a serious mission." (Video)

The 72-year-old McCain, campaigning to become the oldest first-term president in history, presented himself as a reformer willing to take on his fellow Republicans, including Bush -- to whom he lost the presidential nomination in 2000.

And he chastised Republicans for falling prey to the temptations of power before voters deprived them of their majorities in the House of Representatives and Senate two years ago.

"We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us," McCain said. "We lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption."

He vowed to put Democrats and independents in his administration if elected, which struck a favorable chord with Nevada delegate Carol Del Carlo.

"We need to reach across the aisle to solve problems," she said. "It's ridiculous that we don't."

War protesters briefly interrupted McCain's acceptance speech, a small reflection of much larger protests that have been carried out all week in St. Paul, some of them turning violent and prompting hundreds of arrests. (Video | Story)

Obama spokesman Bill Burton dismissed McCain's acceptance speech and his calls for change and bipartisanship as being at odds with "the fact that he's been part of that crowd for 26 years."

The polls indicate a close race between McCain and Obama, with the outcome likely to be decided in scattered swing states in the industrial Midwest and the Southwest.