There was much derision of Rove's comparison of Obama to that guy at the country club with the drink and the cigarette and the beautiful date making fun the other members.  The immediate response was "ha ha ha, what a Republican tool; most white blue collar voters won't even know what he's talking about." 

Well, the truth is, I don't know what Rove was talking about.  My exposure to country clubs is very, very minimal.  I think golf is a form of insanity and frankly, I've found that rich people are toxic when the congregate in herds.  So I don't really know if that guy is sufficiently common to actually be a real country club archetype. 

Doesn't matter.  The fact is that I (and a lot of  you), knowing that Rove is a fat-cat Republican country club asshole who was talking to his own kind, assumed Rove knew what he was talking about and was describing a real archetype.  And, more importantly, most of the MSM thought so too, bucause, truth to tell, most of them aren't millionaires and many of them so value their self-perceived blue collar  cred that they wouldn't join a country club even if they could afford it.  (Besides, if they have the golf insanity, most of them live in towns with decent municipal and clubless courses and they know plenty of people who are country club members.)  We didn't stop to consider that this is Rove we're talking about here and, therefore, ipso facto,  may just be making shit up.  And it doesn't matter. 

What matters is that he thinks he's getting two smear memes injected into the dialogue for the price of one. 

The first one is the one that's already been noted here.  The racial one.  "Arrogant" black man = uppity n****r.  Beautiful girl at a country club = beautiful white girl. So he's an arrogant n****r with a beautiful white woman.  "Heh," grunts Karl, as he wallows down a little deeper into his nightly slime bath, "that oughta get the working class white guys oiling up their guns." 

But ol' Karl, he's a clever little piggie.  (And, hey, no one's more convinced of Karl's cleverness than Karl himself.)  Why shoot one irritating barb into the the flesh of the angry working class white guys when you can fire two?  "Arrogant," you see, has two coded meanings.  Use it in connection with a black man and it means "uppity."  Use it in connection with anyone, however, and it means "smart." 

Let us be blunt, for once, and speak that which must never be spoken because it attacks the core American value that "everyone is special."  I don't want to bruise anyone's self-esteem, but politics isn't pretty. 

"Arrogant" is what we Americans call people who fail to adhere to the uniquely American social convention that requires smart people to pretend they're not.  "Arrogant" is the word that people in the middle of the bell curve use to justify anger and resentment at those at the far right end--at least the successful ones; the unsuccessful ones are, of course, called "losers." 

And, of course, "arrogant" is, most specifically, the word that smart Republicans who are cynically pretending they're just plain folks use when they want to enable ugly anti-intellectualism against a smart Democrat who doesn't have Bill Clinton's knack for hiding brains or Hillary's knack for making you feel small if you try to make an issue of it. 

Cynical anti-intellectualism is near and dear to the heart of the Republican Party.  It is a far older tool in their electoral toolkit than the Southern Strategy.  It's bound into the heart of their traditional Red-baiting ways and they acquired a near monopoly on it when the Dixiecrats (always fond of berating "pinty-haded aintalectshuls") defected to their side.   

There weren't enough hours in the day for Eisenhower's surrogates to get their daily quote of sneering at Stevenson's egg-headedness done, the irony being that Eisenhower was himself a brilliant, brilliant man himself.  (The difference was that Ike hid it well where Stevenson hid it not at all.)  Spiro Agnew's entire purpose was to use smart-sounding words written for him by Richard Safire to attack intellectuals.  And of course, Warren Harding and GWB, birds of a feather if ever two flew, made it central to their campaigns as a matter of necessity, because both were complete dumbasses running against unapolegitically smart people. 

And therein lies the problem Karl perceives and hopes to address with this double-barrelled smear.  Although the Republicans luvs them some anti-intellectualism, the fact is that most of the time they were running guys who were perceptably smart, even if they kept a lid on it.  Guys like Ike and the Trickster.  

The campaigns of George W. Bush, however, were dedicated to the proposition that the Presidency of the United States was not a job calling for a person who was any smarter than your random guy in a bar precisely because he wasn't.  The MSM gleffully bought into it--Gore/Kerry are such Ivy League smartypants, ugh, and, hey, what could happen?--and here we are. 

Yep, here we are indeed.  We've run that experiment and people have noticed that the result has been an absolute fucking disaster.  As a direct result, it now looks like "smart" is actually going to be a popular brand for the next few years. 

So what to do if you're Karl? He can't re-brand McCain as smart, and, anyway, positive doesn't sell and, besides, Karl hates McCain and would rather stop eating endangered species than say something nice about him.  And its not like Karl has more than one tool in his box anyway.  In Karl's world, virtue is vice, positive is negative, advantage is a disadvangate.  It's the Way to Win. 

So, yeah, that Obama sure is "arrogant."  Probably stands around all day and makes fun of dumbasses like youse guys, 'cause isn't that what "arrogant" people do?  Grrr, that just burns me up, don't it burn you up?  Smart is good, but you don't have to be all in our faces with it. 
And lookit, the uppity n****r has a cigarette and a white woman.