I was wondering when someone would get it that running against Bush and tying McCain to him isn’t such a good strategy when the nation is tired of the partisan bickering. Obama was supposed to be post-partisan but now he just sounds like any other lefty partisan with their Bush hating rhetoric. Trippi offers some words of advice on how to turn the campaign around:

But now it’s the Obama campaign’s turn to learn the lesson of the Clinton campaign. The Obama campaign looks at all its polling data and research and in a race between change and four more years of George Bush, change wins big. So it keeps trying to frame the race as four more years of George Bush and more of the same vs. change and cannot understand why it isn’t pulling away.

It’s not just Palin.
The brilliance of the McCain strategy and messaging is that it includes a trap for Obama. To push back on the McCain claim of “country first” and “the original mavericks who will shake up Washington,” the Obama campaign’s attack of “four more years of George Bush” becomes a problem. In a country that yearns for post-partisan change the Obama campaign risks sounding too partisan and like more of the same.
It would not surprise me if in one of the debates Obama or Biden uses the “you voted with George Bush and supported him 93% of the time,” and it’s John McCain that retorts “that’s the kind of partisan attack the American people are sick of….”.

Actually McCain should say at that point, “You voted with Reid and the rest of the Democrats 97% of the time, that doesn’t sound very post-partisan.”
I think Obama would have a problem dropping the whole McSame schtick because the left want this election to be a referendum on Bush. They want to finally beat him at the polls. Wouldn’t it be funny if he won yet again 🙂