"The question is, will Mrs. Clinton fight Ms. Palin to help her former rival, Mr. Obama?"

Patrick Healy asks:

Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Palin have little in common beyond their breakout performances at the conventions and the soap opera aspects of their family lives. Mrs. Clinton always faces high expectations; Ms. Palin faced low expectations this week, and benefited from them. Mrs. Clinton can seem harsh when she goes on the attack; Ms. Palin has shown a knack for attacking without seeming nasty. Mrs. Clinton has a lot of experience; Ms. Palin, not so much. Mrs. Clinton is pantsuits; Ms. Palin is skirts.

Some Republican delegates in St. Paul saw starker differences.

“Sarah’s smile is sincere, which I never felt from Hillary, who has anger and resentment in her eyes,” said Ann Schmuecker, a delegate from Mountain Home, Arkansas, where she met the Clintons decades ago.

(Song cue.)

But Palin may appeal to the "white working women with children living in the exurbs and in rural parts of battleground states" who stuck by Hillary in the primaries. Obama may look to Hillary to try to deliver those voters to him, but then the question is: Does she want to?

Some of her aides note with a hint of resentment that Mr. Obama did not pick her as his running mate; he did not even vet her fully.

Fully? I thought he didn't vet her at all!

Plus, they add, her fall calendar also includes campaigning for Senate Democratic candidates, not just for Mr. Obama.

Ha ha, yeah. She's too busy!

“Let me tell you something,” said Luanne Van Werven, a Republican delegate from Lynden, Wash., as the convention closed late Thursday night. “I secretly think Hillary loves Sarah Palin.”

Oh, is sisterhood powerful all of a sudden? No. It's just that Hillary may want Obama to lose so she can run for 2012.

ADDED: In the comments, some people are making something of the NYT's use of different honorifics for Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. Why is it Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Palin? The NYT is following a longstanding neutral rule:

The use of “Mrs.” is appropriate whenever a woman prefers it. It isn’t our choice, yours or mine; it is hers. Our style rule calls for us to use "Ms." in subsequent references to a woman unless she prefers "Miss" or "Mrs." and reporters are told that they should ask for the woman’s preference. That holds for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as well as other women (in her case, of course, "Senator" is also an option in subsequent references).

Hillary Clinton is one of those women who asked to be called Mrs.:

THE sign outside Nancy Pelosi's office bears the mark of her feminist roots: it identifies her as "Ms. Pelosi," using the honorific created half a century ago to give women an alternative to disclosing their marital status.

But mostly Mrs. Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, goes by just that — Mrs. Pelosi.

Across the Capitol, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, is referred to as Mrs. Clinton at every roll call. Yet the women in the Senate are split: seven use Mrs., but the other six go by Ms., including three who are married: Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine; Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana; and Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan.

Now, you can analyze the personality or the political strategy of various women as they decide whether to overcome the default and ask to be called "Mrs." (or "Miss"), but put aside your theories about New York Times bias.