Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) campaign has signaled in recent days it will hit back harder and more quickly to criticism from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) campaign, mirroring the rapid response efforts of President Bill Clinton’s 1992 war room.

Senior Obama officials have said they intend to respond to Clinton’s professed strategy of throwing the “kitchen sink” at the Illinois senator. And even though Obama supporters say they are still running a positive campaign, the responses have been more intense.

The Illinois senator began beefing up his own war room last fall, and the idea has become commonplace in presidential campaigns after the famous success of the Bill Clinton war room, which featured aides James Carville and George Stephanopoulos.

But Obama missed a chance at a knockout punch in last week’s Ohio and Texas primaries. Some said the campaign responded too slowly and too sloppily to the Clinton campaign’s attacks over an Obama adviser’s comments to the Canadian government regarding the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Locked in the political fight of her life, Clinton and her campaign were quick to label the Obama campaign’s seemingly equivocating statements on the subject “NAFTA-gate.”

The Obama camp’s response was criticized as muddled and inaccurate, putting blood in the water for reporters who were being accused of not adequately “vetting” Obama.

But in the days that have followed, the Obama campaign has stepped up its rhetoric in the campaigns’ daily dueling conference calls with reporters.

In the early part of this week, the Obama campaign has responded forcefully to Clinton campaign charges that Obama has not “passed the commander-in-chief test,” and it also stayed on the offensive questioning Clinton’s foreign policy experience.

After Clinton scored points with her “Children” ad in Texas, featuring a sleeping child and the now-famous 3 a.m. phone call, the Obama campaign has not let any charge of foreign policy inexperience go by the wayside.

On Monday, the Obama campaign rolled out its top foreign policy advisers at a Washington press conference to detail their belief in Obama’s preparedness. On Tuesday, the campaign kicked off the now-daily skirmish with a memo and a conference call.

The memo, from former Clinton aide and current Obama supporter Greg Craig, detailed what the campaign says is evidence of Clinton’s lack of foreign policy experience. He used the Clinton charge of “just words” to describe her role in 1990s foreign policy discussions and decisions.

“As far as the record shows, Sen. Clinton never answered the phone … to make a decision on any pressing national security issue — not at 3 a.m. or at any other time of day,” Craig wrote in the memo.

Shortly after the morning conference call ended, Obama senior adviser David Axelrod was joined by communications director Bill Burton and supporter Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) to respond to controversial comments by Clinton supporter and ex-Rep. Geraldine Ferraro (D-N.Y.).

Ferraro, the 1984 Democratic vice presidential nominee and a current member of Clinton’s finance committee, said in a newspaper interview that if Obama were “a white man, he would not be in this position.”

“And if he was a woman [of any color] he would not be in this position,” Ferraro reportedly said. “He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”