MILWAUKEE, WISC. — John McCain is not showing up in Wisconsin until today, four days before the primary and two days after Mike Huckabee. Not that conservatives are clamoring.

But they might soften eventually, given what Barack Obama’s been saying here. They’re for Mr. McCain, if he’s the candidate — maybe. So went the very restrained enthusiasm last weekend at a state convention of 400 conservative activists, politicians, young bloggers, and old lit-droppers.

One prominent state lawmaker, asked casually whether he was okay with Mr. McCain, said he would be the next day, after he formally endorsed him. A knowing silence ensued. Later, a legislative aide, a young guy who’s worked for fiscal-hawk groups, said he’d vote for Mr. McCain — but he wouldn’t knock on doors for him. Others said they were waiting to see whether he’d screw up picking a vice president. A common response: “Well, what do you think of him?”

Meanwhile, Mr. Huckabee’s been flitting around the state since Wednesday. He says he’ll talk up his pro-life record. Good move: Wisconsin is home to the pugnacious anti-abortion group that went to the Supreme Court for the right to mention Senator Feingold’s name in TV ads. Why did Wisconsin Right to Life have to sue for free speech? Because of the McCain-Feingold campaign “reforms.” And what name is that, conjoined with Mr. Feingold? Yup.

Nice shot by Mr. Huckabee, but one of the few polls anyone’s released lately shows Mr. McCain beating him 45% to 27% in Wisconsin. Another 21% are undecided, apparently over whether to try the more exciting democratic race, which you can do here until the moment your pencil touches the ballot. There, the poll put Mr. Obama ahead of Hillary Clinton 45% to 41%.

Other signs aren’t good for Mrs. Clinton. She’s not here until Saturday, sticking to Texas and Ohio. She’s only now buying broadcast ads.

Mr. Obama, meanwhile, was rallying 17,000 people in Madison the night he won the Potomac primaries. There was the usual euphoria. “This is a moment in history I can’t pass up,” said one 56-year-old, while a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison called the rally “the best experience I’ve had in my life.”

The senator then took this satori around the state the next day, to rust-belt Racine, to a General Motors plant in Janesville, even to Waukesha County, part of suburban Milwaukee that reliably votes Republican but which has, by dint of size, the third largest concentration of democrats in the state.

In these places, Mr. Obama began being instructive for conservatives not yet sold on Senator McCain.

Sure, he talked about hope and audacity and change. He also started making promises and talking economics. Mr. Obama has plans.

Stressed families? We need to subsidize child care. Failing schools? We need to send nurses into homes to help raise “our” children to be educable. There’s no crisis in Social Security that can’t be fixed by absolving the non-rich from paying. Health care? “We’re going to subsidize people.” Being old? Income-tax subsidies.

As for unemployment, that’s a matter of deep-sixing the north American Free Trade Agreement — and of subsidizing job training for those who somehow escaped Wisconsin’s well funded schools or its panoply of technical colleges and four-year colleges and endless existing training programs.

Where would Mr. Obama get the money? Giving up in Iraq, though he talks vaguely of toughness in Afghanistan. He mentions reaping billions from businesses in cap-and-trade schemes to make us all use less energy. Whether this impedes the success that Janesville factory’s had making Yukons and other SUVs, Mr. Obama didn’t say.

This may sell. Wisconsin should be a Clinton-friendly state. It’s less college-educated than the nation as a whole, its median income is lower, its democratic voters are older and their collars bluer. These are people Mrs. Clinton’s won elsewhere. Talking subsidies and denouncing trade, Mr. Obama may win them here.

He may also hit the alarming note that Mr. McCain needs. As I stood there in my Wal-Mart dress shoes — $19.95, thank you very much, China — listening to this man tell me he wanted to “fix” free trade, I realized he was talking about rewinding the past 30 years. Forget JFK. It hits you that Mr. Obama’s details and aims eerily recall the Carter administration.

This may overcome any lingering Hillary-love among those aging blue-collar voters. To Democrats in Wisconsin, the 1970s are the pre-Wal-Mart, pre-Reagan peak, when their party ran the state, before Governor Tommy Thompson and welfare reform, back when factories chugged and unions got more and businesses humbly paid their taxes.

To conservatives over 40, those were the times that put Reagan and Thompson in power. They were the policies that made a lot of people into conservatives, at least for a while.

One argument against Mr. McCain is that shunning him as insufficiently conservative will produce a Democratic president and such a Carteresque fiasco as to forever empower Republicans. Attractive, but we’re still stuck with bureaucracies and a mullah-fied Iran from the last such political masochism. I don’t know that repulsion alone can send conservatives to victory, but now that Mr. Obama is fleshing out his plans, it clarifies the advantages Mr. McCain possesses over him. We may see Wisconsin conservatives’ enthusiasm growing in the coming days.

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.