Change? What change?

The Obama camp's change message has basically two components.

One is a call for "post partisanship", an end to "politics as usual", and a farewell to cronyism, special interests and corruption.

The other part of that change message is about *policy* change. Obama wants to take the US in a different direction. There's talk about nationalizing health care, tax changes, global warming initiatives, pulling out of Iraq asap and so on.

Lately Obama has been emphasizing the second kind of change, the policy change, and for good reason: His track record doesn't back up the post partisanship type of change. He's got the most inflexible liberal voting record of any member of the senate. He grew up in Chicago politics and yet his campaign cannot point to a single instance where he challenged the old corrupt Chicago ways. For all his talk about ending politics as usual, Obama has zero track record to back this up.

McCain is now starting to eat Obama's lunch and it could get interesting. Simply put, McCain has a real authentic claim to the first kind of change. McCain demonstrably fought earmarks (he's never requested a single one), corruption (he led the charge against Abramoff, a republican lobbyist who's now in jail), and he's reached across the isle and worked with democrats on numerous issues, often infuriating his own party: Campaign finance reform, immigration, global warming etc.

The brilliance of McCain's choice of Sarah Palin is that it allows him to stress his independence. Voters always knew that the Obama claim that McCain was just "more of the same" was a stretch, but with Palin securing the conservative base, McCain is free to remind voters of his track record. If anything, Palin reinforces the reformer image, herself a political maverick who threw out the incumbent governor from her own party.

There will be a ferocious fight now about who's the "real candidate" of change. Obama has, for the first time, been put on the defensive on this his most crucial message. Predictably, he's saying that the choice of Palin is just "more of the same", but that clearly won't fly: A woman governor, mother of five, with a strong reformer image and no Washington background, cannot credibly be relegated to "more of the same".

Obama knows this and that's why democrats are furiously trying to reign back the "change" mantel and put Palin back in the box. But the genie is out of the bottle and the wheels are starting to come off the Obama bandwagon. This will be a more exciting election than anyone had imagined.