New RNC ad: How many rounds did you golf while the oil was leaking, champ?

A snappy montage illustrating Obama’s “bloodless quality” and “emotional detachment” from the spill, as rabidly right-wing NYT columnist Maureen Dowd put it this morning. Sad to say, I don’t think this meme’s going to gain traction, not because The One’s not guilty of callousness but because media-fueled public perceptions about how much Democrats care will immunize him somewhat. Bush’s golfing was Big News because it fit the “out of touch” icy-hearted Republican stereotype; Obama, by contrast, gets to sway along to the end of “Hey Jude” with nary a peep uttered in the press because they know that, between those “na na na nas,” he’s aching for the gulf’s shrimping industry. Ah well.

The more trenchant RNC attack on The One today comes via Byron York, who spotlights this clever cause-and-effect list of Obama appearing to blindly follow whatever dopey conventional wisdom about the spill has captured the media’s imagination from day to day. It’s too good to excerpt; read it all and wonder no longer where that supposedly spontaneous “whose ass to kick” comment came from. For a guy who’s forever whining about the 24-hour news cycle, he sure seems to pay a lot of attention to it. In fact, I wonder if the predictability of his spin is contributing to his eroding support among the left, culminating in the widespread backlash to last night’s “respect my authori-tah” Oval Office address. Just have a look at Jon Stewart laying him out in the second clip below, all but accusing him of out-Bushing Bush. The less Change-y he seems, the more trouble he’s in, and needless to say, slow federal responses to catastrophes off the coast of New Orleans are pretty much the antithesis of Change.