Campaign Notebook: GOP's Hagel says Palin isn't qualified CAMPAIGN NOTEBOOK

Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel said his party's vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, lacks foreign policy experience and called it a "stretch" to say she's qualified to be president.

"She doesn't have any foreign policy credentials," Hagel said in an interview published Thursday by the Omaha World-Herald. "You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I mean, I don't know what you can say. You can't say anything."

Could Palin lead the country if GOP presidential nominee John McCain could not?

"I think it's a stretch to, in any way, to say that she's got the experience to be president of the United States," Hagel said.

Hagel, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in July and had said he would have considered serving as Obama's running mate.

Michelle Obama targets female voters

asked voters Thursday to make their choice on the issues, not for such reasons as "I like that guy" or "She's cute."

Might she be talking about Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin?

"I'm talking about me," she said with a smile. Barack Obama's wife, however, is not on the ticket in the presidential election. Palin is.

Michelle Obama is part of a concerted effort involving her husband, his running mate, Sen. Joe Biden, and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to neutralize the appeal that Palin has brought to John McCain's ticket for some female voters. They are doing so unmistakably but gingerly, so as to not appear sexist or invite another "lipstick-on-a-pig" tempest.

Michelle Obama's remarks came at a women's roundtable on the economy.