Obama’s first Oval Office address to the nation opened with a militaristic tone. Faced with the biggest environmental disaster the US has ever seen, and the biggest challenge Obama has seen so far from the White House, the president opened with talk of troops mobilized to fight this man made disaster.

The speech quickly moved away from the day-to-day fight that the four Gulf Coast states face to talk about the long term. Obama made mention of the difficulty to define what the long term game plan will be as the damage continues to unfold on the Gulf’s shoreline.

The uncertainty caught up this disaster has repeatedly surfaced in the conversations I’ve had since I’ve been in Louisiana. Comparisons to Katrina frequently place this disaster further up the trauma scale as the cost remains unknown. This is intensified by the need, post-crisis, for people to be active as they seek to restore normality. Many people are feeling that the cleanup effort is in many ways futile as more oil continues to wash up on shore. By addressing this emotive aspect of the BP disaster, Obama should have scored points as an ‘understanding’ president.

The focus on the long term restoration of the Gulf’s environment, and a move to more preventative measures to limit further oil damage, suggested the development of close fraternal bond between The White House and the Gulf Coast states. This comes at a time when many Gulf residents are feeling isolated as yet another crisis blows over their shores. This was echoed on the local radio today as New Orleans’ most famous radio anchor, Garland Robinette, described Louisiana as a tiny third world country attached to the United States.

The call to the long term, may also help to alleviate some of the criticism that the White House’s response to the BP crisis has been all rhetoric while the action has been left to the local governments. But, the administration will now have to follow these strong words with action, and quickly.

This may be hard to do. The completion of the relief wells that should stop the leak is scheduled for August. In the meantime, there is little Obama can do apart from continue to cheerlead the cleanup effort and slam BP. His promise to remove the payout of claims to businesses affected by the crisis from BP’s control and into the hands of an unbiased arbitrator will help fill the gap. But only if the impact of this change is immediately felt on the ground.

The final judgment of Obama’s call to action tonight won’t happen until August when the relief wells have either worked or failed. And if the outcome in August is anything other than a clear success (and remember the many shades of grey that have already surfaced as BP has answered what appear to be straight forward yes and no questions), then the next chapters of this cathartic tale might also be the closing ones for a presidency.

This evening’s speech had the tone of a President trying to maintain control of his 4 year term in the face of the unexpected. If it weren’t for the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Obama would currently be in Indonesia making good the promise he made last year in Cairo to end “cycle of suspicion and discord” in the Muslim world. The spill has also seeped into time that the White House wanted to spend on immigration reform, and has flattened the one concession that might have lured Republicans into a deal on climate change- more offshore drilling.

The president addressed the climate change point as he shifted gear to call for an end to “our addiction to fossil fuel”. And his choice of words made clear that the idea of a concession for the Republicans was absolutely off the table.

The phrase ‘fossil fuel’, rather than oil, offered a split with his predecessor – in 2006 Bush announced, “we are addicted to oil” – and the Republicans. The choice of words is also important as the President is currently struggling in the same state that created the fodder for many of Bush’s harshest critics, and Obama needs to seize every chance he has to distance himself from that legacy if his own is to extend beyond 4 years.

Obama continued to turn the Republican ‘drill, baby, drill’ mantra on its head as he used the statistic commonly used to support the opposition’s case – that the US consumes 20 per cent of the world’s oil – to support his own- a clean energy future – with the addition of one detail: the US holds only 2 per cent of the world’s oil reserves.

Obama continued as if in answer to the predictable criticism that the other side will level at the plan- the cost. “$1 billion is sent each day to foreign countries for its oil,” the President said, as he explained that the transition to clean energy does not need to be an economic burden. That saving combined with the potential to create millions of jobs, should require critics to develop a slightly more intellectual argument against the President’s plan. Though, “he can’t”, is likely to be the starting point for many critics, nonetheless. That being said, Robert Gibbs better have some solid facts and calculations to back up the President’s $1 billion statement, and how its going to translate into savings for us all.

The President also called to a partnership between “workers and entrepreneurs” in his clean energy utopia. This last point was a quiet knock down of the criticism Obama has received for sitting down with ‘experts and academics’ over the BP crisis rather than seeking to gain an understanding of the situation from the workers.

Even with all the talk of partnerships – Obama and the Gulf, workers and entrepreneurs – the partnership offer does not appear to extend over party lines. Obama made only one direct reference to the Republican Party as he offered them a fleeting invitation to join his clean energy campaign on the proviso that “they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuel”.

Despite this single direct reference to partisan divides, the entire speech centered on them. The mid terms are looming towards the President and they are bigger and darker than oil that continues to spew into the Gulf. If the current administration is going to be anything other than ceremonial figurehead in the second half of its first term, then it needs to be clear about what it is, what it stands for and what it’s going to do about it all. And it needs to make that clear now.

As opinion polls have continued to show, Obama needs to follow his seventeen minutes of precisely pitched rhetoric with action.