It’s reasonable to assume the election will be won and lost in places more like "The Electric City" than places like Peoria (not that I really know what kind of place Peoria is). There we find the "anxious" voters--who worry about their country, their family, and their economic security. McCain can offfer them his fierce, honorable love of America (vs. the postmodern, post-American or a-American Obama), a fight against the bureaucratic and judicial experts contemptuous of the real lives of ordinary Americans (with the centerpiece being the fight against the unlimited judicial activism of a wholly and overwhelmingly Democratic government), and a health care plan that detaches insurance from employment, mandates and makes easy universal coverage, and gets coverage affordable, private, and competitive (avoiding a single-payer national bureaucracy). (It was smart, by the way, for Obama to a pick a man from Scranton, not that the election will literally turn on who carries Scranton.)
Conservative health insurance reform as described above is needed, but making it happen is really politically complicated. People are not liking how the current employer based system is eroding their living standards and tying them to jobs they don't want or churning their guts if they switch jobs and have a gap in coverage (its extra bad if you have kids). On the other hand, saying that you are going to get away from an employer based system can sound like you are going to take their insurance away from them with only the promise that things will work out in the private market. This to people to the working class and lower middle class people who have not been doing all that great in the private market lately. From that perspective it can seem like conservatives are trying to make people's health care plans another victim of globalization. First you lose your job security, then your health care plan. The selling job can probably be done. No doubt Bobby Jindal could do it. About McCain I'm less sure.
The good news is that the Democrats are so obsessed with expanding coverage (especially government provided coverage)that they are failing to address most people's main problems with the current system - rising cost and lack of portability. That does leave McCain a real opening.
Pete, Well said. I will plagiarize that.