ST LOUIS - ALASKA Governor Sarah Palin, the first woman nominated by the Republican party as vice president, said the best way to gauge Americans' feelings about the failing US financial system and the US$700 billion (S$1 trillion) rescue plan was to go to a soccer game and ask the parents on the sidelines.

'I bet you're going to hear fear,' she said in her debate with Democratic Senator Joe Biden, assuring voters that she and Republican presidential nominee John McCain were the 'mavericks' who could reform the system.

Mrs Palin said 'Joe Six-packs and hockey moms across the country' needed to band together to say 'never again.' Those are both terms Mrs Palin has used to describe herself as she has sought to ingratiate herself with middle-class Americans.

Mr Biden opened the debate by blaming the Republican party's handling of the country's economy over the eight years of President George W. Bush's administration, which Mr Biden said would be continued by Mr John McCain, the party's presidential nominee.

He also defended the Obama plan to raise taxes on Americans making more than US$250,000 annually was a matter of 'simple fairness.' 'This is not punitive,' he said, adding that middle class Americans deserved tax breaks.

Mrs Palin said Mr Obama was promoting a 'redistribution of wealth' that would result in fewer jobs and a reduction of tax revenues.

Mr Biden accused Mr McCain of planning to give big corporations an additional US$300,000 in tax breaks. 'That's not redistribution of wealth. That's fairness,' he said.

He also called the Republican party's plan for revising the American health insurance system the 'ultimate bridge to nowhere,' referring to the financial boondoggle that was killed in Alaska after first being supported by Mrs Palin as governor.

Mrs Palin refused to blame global warming on human activity but conceded Earth's climate was changing. Mr Biden said the Earth was growing warmer because of the burning of carbon dioxide-emitting fuels and said Republicans could not solve the problem because they did not acknowledge its true cause.

With the Republican ticket falling in the polls, Mrs Palin was carrying a heavy burden in the back and forth with Mr Biden, a 36-year veteran of the US Senate.

Mr McCain took a huge gamble in choosing Mrs Palin, whose addition to the ticket initially mobilised the party's conservative base around his candidacy. In the meantime, however, her inexperience and provincial demeanour have become fodder for late-night television comedians.

Also, in the month since she stepped onto the national stage as the first female Republican vice presidential nominee, the 44-year-old Palin has proved uneven in solo news interviews, showing a lack of experience and breadth of knowledge normally expected in a candidate who would take over in the White House should the 72-year-old McCain win the election, then become incapacitated.

An Associated Press-Gfk poll released on Wednesday found that just 25 per cent of likely voters believe Palin has the right experience to be president. That is down from 41 per cent just after the Republican convention, when the Alaska governor made her well-received national political debut.

The same survey shows Democrat Barack Obama with a 48 per cent to 41 per cent lead in voter preference with less than five weeks remaining until Election Day, Nov 4.

Mrs Palin is facing a man 21 years her elder and one of the Senate's foreign policy deans. Mr Biden is loquacious and gaffe-prone, however, and had to fold his first presidential campaign in 1988 after appropriating to himself parts of the biography of British Labour Party leader at the time, Mr Neil Kinnock. Mr Biden, who must take special care not to condescend to Mr Palin, has issued similar overstatements this year as well.

Public Broadcasting Service journalist Gwen Ifill is moderating the 90-minute debate at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Ms Ifill, herself, has come under criticism from some conservatives because she is writing a book, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, on how politics have changed among black Americans since the civil rights era of the 1960s.

The journalist says she has not yet written the chapter on Mr Obama and questioned why critics assume it will be favourable toward the Democratic candidate, a first-term Illinois senator.

Mrs Palin has seemed poorly informed in the few interviews she has granted. In a CBS television News interview aired on Wednesday she appeared unable to cite a US Supreme Court decision with which she disagreed while saying many decisions had divided Americans. She likewise could not name magazines and newspapers that she reads.

She also has been widely lampooned for citing Alaska's proximity to Russia as an example of her foreign policy expertise. Mrs Palin has never visited Russia, and until last year she had never travelled outside North America.

Mr McCain and other Republicans criticised such questions as 'gotcha journalism,' and he defended his running mate in appearances on Thursday on several television talk shows.

He dismissed suggestions that he was upset with campaign staff for holding back Mrs Palin and not letting her be herself on the campaign trail.

'We let Sarah be Sarah. She's smart, she's tough, she's been in debates before,' Mr McCain told Fox television. 'The American people, ... the more they see of her, the more they love her, and I'm confident of that at the end.' Mr McCain, meanwhile, abandoned efforts to win Michigan, a Great Lakes industrial state where he had thought he might win.

Republican officials with knowledge of the strategy said Mr McCain was removing staff, curtailing advertising and cancelling visits to the battleground state. Resources will be sent to Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida and other competitive states.

Polls show support shifting rapidly to Mr Obama since the first presidential debate on Sept 26 in Mississippi. Although the candidates discussed the depth of their experience and their foreign policy preferences, it appeared that their comments on the faltering US economy most influenced voters.

Both men, as well as Mr Biden, returned to their Senate seats on Wednesday to cast votes in favour of the much-revised US$700 billion Bush administration plan to rescue America's failing financial system. The measure, rejected on Monday by the House of Representatives, was expected to go to the floor a second time, perhaps on Friday. The first House vote sent the stock market into a 778-point nose-dive, the largest one-day point drop in history. -- AP