I have a new story up about following Sarah Palin around Ohio. Talking to people there, you really get a sense of the lingering problem John McCain had with the Republican base, and how it was only the selection of Palin that fixed the problem — sort of:

“I am Middle America,” Eric Rinehart tells me as we stand in front of the Ross County Courthouse after Sarah Palin’s appearance here in this city of 21,000, sometimes called a bellwether city in a bellwether state. “Central Ohio, NRA member, former Marine out of Lima Company, paid for my own college, live on the west end of town.” With characteristics like that, Rinehart might just be a bellwether voter in a bellwether city in a bellwether state.
A former city councilman here in Chillicothe, Rinehart doesn’t pretend to love John McCain. After McCain wrapped up the nomination last February, Rinehart, a serious conservative who’s also a former local Bush campaign co-chairman, felt what he calls “Carter malaise.” He wasn’t inclined to take part in the campaign. “My attitude was, I’m going to the polls and that’s it — no grass rooting, no nothing.”
And then McCain picked Palin. “I absolutely loved it,” Rinehart tells me. “It was a game-changer for me. It was huge for me as a conservative for some light at the end of the tunnel.”
Following Palin around Ohio and Pennsylvania in the last days of the campaign, you meet a lot of Republicans like Rinehart. They don’t hate McCain — they have too much respect for what he’s done in his life — but they felt a distinct shortage of enthusiasm for his candidacy until he picked Palin. Talking to voters in these key states, it’s clear that McCain shouldn’t have had to rely on something so momentous as his vice-presidential pick to fire up a constituency whose support he should have already had, but that is what happened.