Obama uses Palin's criticism of McCain's robocall strategy to exacerbate tensions within the party

This article is more than 11 years old

This article is more than 11 years old

Democrats are playing up a potential Republican rift today after Sarah Palin criticised automated phone calls her party is running across the country that depict Barack Obama as a terrorist sympathiser.

In a candid interview with the reporters travelling on her plane, Palin said voters "get a bit irritated with just being inundated" by her campaign's "robocalls" linking Obama to the 1960s radical William Ayers.

"If I called all the shots, and if I could wave a magic wand," Palin told CNN, "I would be sitting at a kitchen table with more and more Americans, talking to them about our plan to get the economy back on track and winning the war, and not having to rely on the old conventional ways of campaigning that includes those robocalls".

Palin questioned both parties' spending on TV advertisements, saying they were "kind of draining out there in terms of Americans' attention span".

Both Obama aides and the Democratic party are circulating Palin's comments today, seeking to exacerbate the Republicans' internal tensions over the calls.

Three pre-recorded phone calls are making the rounds in swing states such as Missouri and Ohio. One chides Obama for holding a Hollywood fundraiser during the economic crisis, another attacks his abortion record, and a third says ominously that Obama has "worked closely" with Ayers – a claim debunked widely in the press.

Palin is not the first in her party to publicly criticise the McCain robocall strategy. Two Republican senators who face tough re-election battles this year, Susan Collins of Maine and Norm Coleman of Minnesota, have urged McCain to stop the calls.

McCain has come under fire for running anti-Obama robocalls created by the same firm that devised a brutal smear campaign against him eight years ago during his Republican primary race against George W Bush.

The calls broadcast to South Carolina voters in 2000 suggested wrongly that McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter was an illegitimate black child. After the phoned-in rumours were credited with pushing Bush to victory that year, McCain vowed not to use robocalls as a political tactic.