Rove continues to push his favorite meme:

From ABC:

At a breakfast with Republican insiders at the Capitol Hill Club this morning, former White House senior aide Karl Rove referred to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, as “coolly arrogant.”

“Even if you never met him, you know this guy,” Rove said…. “He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”

If you unpack this it’s really disgusting. He’s playing to all the worst classist and racist fears of the Greatest Generation. Obama’s the uppity black guy who some court forced your country club to admit and now he’s flaunting his sexual appetites — why is Rove painting the long-married Obama as a swinging bachelor? — and looking down on you. It’s all said with a veil of civility, but the Lee Atwater-ian subtext couldn’t be clearer.

A week after Obama’s race speech, and we’re back to speaking in code.

Take it away, Karl Rove: “You can tell that he is arrogant, and you can tell that he’s a little bit angry, and you can tell he’s very dismissive.”

Lee Atwater would be proud.

(A special tip of the cap to, Ron Fournier of AP who birthed this meme.)

Apropos of Obama’s extraordinary race speech, I thought I’d share a snippet of writing that didn’t work its way it into my cover story on Obama’s field campaign. It reflects the fact that the post-racial coalition Obama is working to build is already, in part, a reality.

There has recently been the laughable suggestion that the Obama campaign is the dominion of — as a Clinton surrogate put it on the night of her defeat in Wisconsin — “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust-fund babies.”

It’s the same line of attack used by the arch conservative Club For Growth on Howard Dean in 2004. But the contrast of that rhetoric to the reality on the ground at the Obama rally I attended at the Plaza de Guadalupe in San Antonio’s heavily Hispanic, downtrodden West side couldn’t have been more stark.

The overflow crowd of 3,000 that packed into in this public square — in the shadow of a three-story tall replica of a votive candle dedicated to la virgen de Guadalupe — is enough to give me a Hillary-Clinton-in-New-Hampshire moment every time I think back on it.

It looked like something Dr. King might have glimpsed from the mountaintop:

A middle-aged, working class African American couple is sitting next to a graying Asian man with hearing aids. Next to him: a young Hispanic man with slicked back hair, a bushy mustache a red T-shirt decrying the deaths of immigrants at the border. At his side is a white man with close cropped hair, his blond toddler daughter fidgeting on his lap.

And so on. And so on. Like so many snapshots from an Obama family reunion.

Ok. It’s true. They didn’t join hands and sing “Free at last.”

But as the first African-American front-runner in the history of our presidential politics took the stage, they did raise their voices in unison to chant, Si, Se Puede.

Yes We Can.

I’ve only read this speech, but it strikes me as an extraordinary college lecture on race — it is subtle, nuanced, challenging with a sweeping command of history. It is also a political speech, mixed, unevenly at times, with the themes of Obama’s stump oratory, and peppered with a few sour shots at Geraldine Ferraro.

I think it’s a brave and an honest speech. He paints reverend Wright’s inflammatory rhetoric as a metastasis of righteous anger, and says he could no more disown him than he could disown his white grandmother.

Unfortunately, it’s a speech that’s much too smart to be dissected appropriately by the hacky denizens of mid-morning cable TV.

Initial blogospheric reaction from those who saw it live seems to be far more glowing. I’ll post the video ASAP.

What did you think?

Full text of the speech after the jump.

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The Latino Firewall, which I pooh poohed, was in full effect. Clinton won the Hispanic vote 64-24.
Notable: African Americans broke 83 percent for Obama.