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Florida

The walls of the naval base where President Obama made his last speech of this trip to the Gulf of Mexico are lined with picture-sized exhortations.

One caught my eye.

"Leadership is action not a position."

That spells out perfectly the challenge for the president in tonight's speech from the Oval Offfice. Presidents tend to only make such live broadcasts when they want to underline the gravity of what they are discussing, and Obama's decision is very deliberate.

His officials say it is what they call "an inflection point" - a mathematical term to describe the point where a wave on a graph changes direction. In other words, it is a moment where they hope views will change from negative to positive.

It seemed as if his mind was on the bigger speech when he spoke to the military in Florida, delivering his words quickly without much inflection. But it may point to a wider problem.

His speech, in its content, was sensitive, spending as much time praising the military as talking about the Gulf.

But every time he mentioned the Marines the boys would let out an impressive, coordinated whoop. It wouldn't have cost much to acknowledge their high spirits with a joke or a reference.

But he ignored it.

The president's real problem is whether he has gripped this crisis hard enough from the start.

But the perception that he is too cool, too detached, is a big part of it. He must hope tonight is indeed an inflection, not a confirmation of an existing trend.

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