Minn. - Now that much of America is starting to pay closer attention to the presidential campaign - and with the race a virtual tie - Republicans have intensified their strategy to corral the undecided stragglers: reignite the culture wars.

This version won't be as explicit as conservative Pat Buchanan's 1992 GOP convention call for a "cultural war" or even the 2004 race, where anti-gay marriage referendums drove cultural conservatives to the polls in 11 mostly swing states. Instead, this battle will be fought under the cloak of the candidates' personal biographies. Using the GOP paintbrush, the race pits the "ex-POW war hero" and the "hockey mom" versus the Ivy League elitist and the career senator.

Their battlefield: small towns versus big cities; talk radio versus mainstream media and the liberal blogs; heartland versus "Eastern elites."

"It is going to be fought in cities with populations between 50,000 and 100,000 residents," said veteran GOP pollster Frank Luntz. In battleground states like Michigan and Ohio, "instead of going to Detroit and Cleveland, you're going to see them a lot more in the small towns."

The GOP is crafting its narrative in the language of a sort of reverse snobbery. On Thursday, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., called the Obamas - who were both educated at Ivy League schools - "members of an elitist class that thinks they're uppity." Though Westmoreland, a white Republican who represents the Atlanta suburbs, said he didn't mean it in a racial sense, the term has its roots in the pre-Civil War South to describe blacks who spoke up for themselves.

Viewers saw the culture-war strategy blossom during last week's GOP convention, as the Republicans rallied around Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the party's vice presidential nominee, after they felt the media was treating her harshly.

"She is from a small town, with small-town values, but that's not good enough for those folks who are attacking her and her family," said former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson.

When former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani sneered as he mocked Sen. Barack Obama's post-college job as a "community organizer," the hard-core conservatives inside the Xcel Center laughed at Giuliani's joke with seemingly no punch line.

In case viewers watching on television didn't get the inference, Palin provided the context a few moments later. Responding to criticism that the next biggest line of executive experience on her resume was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, population 7,000: "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer," Palin said, "except that you have actual responsibilities."

"I might add," Palin continued, "that in small towns, we don't quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren't listening."

'Community organizer'

In this war, "community organizer" is synonymous with working for a liberal nonprofit organization. Apparently, Republicans have forgotten about how President George H.W. Bush's call for a "thousand points of light" turned into the Hands On Network/Points of Light Foundation, which organizes volunteers to do charitable work.

"The culture wars are back on, baby," said MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, a liberal commentator whose "The Rachel Maddow Show" premieres on the cable network Monday. "Sarah Palin's speech was so hotly anticipated because so little was known about her. Who would have thought that she would have got up there and start channeling Pat Buchanan 1992?"

The difference now, Maddow said, it "is sort of being done more self-consciously than it was then," Maddow said.

"Then, the ascendant right wing was really looking to change America by steamrolling out of the country people who they felt like were anathema to their idea of American values. Now, there is a more self-conscious sense that they are saying they want to do that so as to create a divide in the electorate that they can exploit for political gain."

Republicans have christened Palin, a newcomer to the national political stage, to be their envoy to small-town America.

"When you're in Fresno and something happens, it's news in Fresno," said longtime GOP strategist Ken Khachigian, who was an adviser to Thompson's failed White House bid this year. "But it's not national news."

Khachigian would know how to handle a surprise - and much-maligned - vice presidential pick. In the 1988 presidential campaign, he was a top aide to Dan Quayle, who served as vice president under George H.W. Bush.

All news, all the time

But in this age, everybody with a cell phone camera is a journalist. It will be hard to hide Palin in Ypsilanti, Mich., or Lima, Ohio. Any gaffe will be uploaded to the Internet within minutes.

Still, as part of its bash-the-media tactic, the McCain campaign already is showing signs that it's going to keep her protected from tough questions from reporters, letting the glow of her acceptance speech burn for a while as she hits the road. Senior campaign officials told theAtlantic.com that Palin won't be doing any interviews for a while outside of, perhaps, local press from Alaska.

None of this matters to the hard-core conservatives who greeted her like a rock star at the GOP convention last week and who are showing up at her early events on the campaign trail shouting "Sa-rah! Sa-rah! Sa-rah!" They loathe the media and love her hard line on abortion, which she opposes even if the woman is the victim of rape or incest. And social conservatives approve of her conservative evangelical Christian church in Wasilla supporting a conference in nearby Anchorage that proposes to convert gays to heterosexuals through the power of prayer.

"She is tough, she is strong, she has an attitude that is needed in Washington," said Matt Hayes, a 51-year-old security consultant from Dallas who described her convention speech as "the best I've ever heard. ... She looks especially good when she's contrasted with the elitists on the other side."

But Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California, said the culture-war rhetoric may disappear in a couple of weeks if the McCain campaign's internal polling shows that it isn't connecting with swing voters.

"They were test-marketing a lot of concepts in (Palin's) speech," Baldassare said. "They were trying out an anti-Washington message, an anti-media message and an anti-Democratic message. We'll know more in a couple of weeks. And we'll also be able to tell a lot by how the Democrats respond."