Joe Trippi gets to the nub of Barack Obama’s problem: Sarah Palin is a symptom, not the cause of Obama’s woes. Obama’s real problem is that he lost the “change” message and now sounds like a harsh partisan. McCain made change his theme, divorced himself from his own party and then selected Palin to highlight that message. Trippi writes:

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….”.

What worked for Obama is now working for McCain. The important lesson for the Obama campaign is that the Clinton campaign kept looking at its research, kept stressing experience and did not adjust until it was too late. The McCain campaign has not only adjusted to the Obama message, they have changed the terrain.

But Trippi doesn’t quite say how Obama is supposed to recapture the theme of change. Obama can’t simply restate his slogan — “change we can believe in” — because that’s become a self-parody. He can’t refer to his record of bringing about change — he doesn’t have one. He could, I suppose, come up with a detailed policy laundry list of things he wants to change, but it’s getting late for that sort of thing, it’s not what Obama does best, and it’s likely to reinforce the image that he is a big-government liberal. He could simply repeat the “Bush clone” bit, but you almost sense that the country is beyond that and understands that, hey, one way or another, Bush is leaving. As Trippi says, “McCain is the one running against Washington now. Obama can’t just run against Bush.”

Here’s an idea: stop 90% of the over-the-top, useless negative attacks, put Joe Biden (a gaffe machine who oozes Washington Insider-ness) on a strict diet of boring pablum, do townhalls with or without McCain on issues like education reform and healthcare and pick a fight with some Democratic interest groups to show some independence. Couple that with a candid, tough-talking line on Iran and Russia. In other words, run as the new Bill Clinton. It worked in 1992 and it might work again.

Will he do it? Not a chance–which no doubt greatly pleases the McCain camp.