Pennsylvania's Pragmatic Conservatism

In this NYTimes article, we see that Pennsylvania is forcing Obama to tame his language and make his ideas more concrete:

He is grounding his lofty rhetoric in the more prosaic language of white-working-class discontent, adjusting it to the less welcoming terrain of Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania’s culture, as the historian David Hackett Fischer noted in his book “Albion’s Seed,” is rooted in the English midlands, where Scandinavian and English left a muscular and literal imprint. These are people distrustful of rank, and finery, and high-flown words.

The article also alludes to Pennsylvanians' attitude toward change--change is typically a bad thing, unless that change involves bringing back old jobs (which were often in factories). I love Pennsylvania; this seems profoundly Oakeshottian:

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. ... [C]hange ... appears always, in the first place, as deprivation. ... [H]eaven is the dream of a changeless no less than of a perfect world.