Karl Rove begins his racist smear campaign in the WSJ against Obama---and is not even subtle about it. He sends out the call to the right that this is where they will need to go to smear him.

Her remarks helped wash away the memory of her angry replies to attacks at the debate's start. His trash talking was an unattractive carryover from his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard, and capped a mediocre night.

What imagery does that conjure up for you? Oh, the days of playing some hoops with his posse and working on his slam dunk. Then he takes it a step further with more race baiting tactics:

He is often lazy, given to misstatements and exaggerations and, when he doesn't know the answer, too ready to try to bluff his way through.

Rove couldn't help himself and had to bring in the "lazy effect" to describe Obama. Don't vote for him because he's soooo "lazy"---just like all minorities. Did he say Obama had a "fence around his heart" somewhere in the op-ed?

There is no point in trying to debate whether Obama is "lazy" or plays "basketball" because that's what the right wants us to do. They muddy the waters with endless canards knowing full well that the media will allow enormous amounts of time debating them instead of the issue at hand. "Was Valerie Plame even a CIA undercover agent?" is a typical example of this tactic by the right even after Gen. Hayden, the head of the CIA declared her one. And as we witnessed---the talking heads gave valuable air time to rehash this nonsense instead of focusing on the real issue of the outing of an undercover CIA agent.

We use a phrase called "Dog whistle politics" to describe coded messaging:

"is a term used to describe a type of political campaigning or speechmaking using coded language, which appears to mean one thing to the general population but which has a different or more specific meaning for a targeted subgroup of the audience.

This op-ed by Karl Rove doesn't even bother with coded messages because its blatant racism is so evident on the surface. He's telling his base to to pull out every racist stereotype you can find to attack Obama with---use it early---and use it often.