Dan Froomkin does a very good job explaining all the ways that last night’s speech on BP by President Obama failed to be the turning point the White House claimed it would be. Froomkin concludes:

As for inflection points, there may have been one on Tuesday night after all, just not the one the White House was hoping for. This week could, ultimately, mark the point at which the public, and the media, start actively discounting what the president says, judging him instead on what he does and doesn’t do.

The New York Times editorial board captures the main question that I have which speaks to why I and many others are upset with the response to the BP spill by both the administration and BP.

Fifty-six days into the spill and it is not clear who is responsible — BP, federal, state or local authorities — for the most basic decisions, like when to deploy booms to protect sensitive wetlands. It’s not even clear how much oil is pouring out of the ruptured well. On Tuesday, a government panel raised the estimate to as much as 60,000 barrels a day.

These are really fundamental questions, but the President hasn’t been able to adequately answer them.

Moreover, as Jason Linkins at Huffington Post points out, the much-heralded speech last night didn’t attempt to change our understanding of how the administration is responding nor what we can expect moving forward. It just reiterated things that Obama clearly wants to have done, with no vision for the plan that will realize them. Linkins writes:

I mean, don’t get me wrong. Obama really, really wants to stop the oil spill. And he really, really wants to hold BP accountable for the damage they’ve done. And he really, really wants the Gulf Coast to come through this hardship and he really, really wants to wean us from our dependency on foreign oil, and oil in general. But “really, really wants” is not a plan, and only the bitterest and most brain-dead of political opponents would have presumed, going into tonight, that Obama had not yet properly sentimentalized his opinions on any of those matters.

I guess, at the bottom, I don’t understand what the point of the Oval Office address was. The small policy and punitive steps were already announced in days prior to the speech. Only the most cynical opponents and trite journalists think an even more emotional response actually means something. And in the end, the timing of a speech that lacked groundbreaking action of forceful clarity strikes me solely as being driven by goals of changing perceptions than goals of changing reality.

I don’t begrudge the President for using the power of the office to further his agenda and his positioning, regardless of what that it is. Elections have consequences and he’s entitled to make sure the public knows what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. But I just don’t think this speech succeeded in speaking to the real questions of who is in charge, what does that mean, how are resources being marshaled to stop the leak and how are resources being deployed to contain and clean up oil that is out already.  As a result, people will continue to be angry and, at least in my case, fundamentally dissatisfied by the lack of clarity as to who is in charge and what that means.

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism has a really good post on how, finally, Obama is getting tough on BP and more importantly, how absurd BP’s assumption that they would not be held fully accountable by the US government for this spill has been. The upcoming meeting between Obama and BP executives seems to have them actually worried about what might happen – and this meeting will be the perfect opportunity for the president to stop being deferential to a major corporation and hold them accountable for their disaster. Of course, as Smith writes, this hasn’t actually happened yet:

I wouldn’t be optimistic; Team Obama has yet to rough up anyone. But this particular set of circumstances – a monstrous disaster that is not going to be resolved anytime soon and a rich, unpopular, and relatively isolated target – will show whether Obama’s survival instincts will overcome his deep seated deference to corporate chieftains.

Right. And if Obama meets with BP execs and backs off from doing anything substantive, our worst fears for Obama will have been confirmed.

At this point, though, for all the reasons that BP must be held accountable, I find it impossible to think that the administration would not positively try to hold them accountable.

On TPM, Theda Skocpol is given space to respond to Robert Reich’s case for President Obama putting BP America in receivership so the company would be forced “to use all its available resources and submit itself to full federal oversight and control.” Skocpol’s response is purely taken from a political standpoint:

When a huge private corporation makes a mess and cannot fix it, it is sheer lunacy to take direct charge of that mess unless you can fix it right away.

This is not about politics. It’s about fixing a cataclysmic disaster in the Gulf. That actually matters to some people, but apparently not Skocpol. Sure, BP is saying nothing can produce the results needed to stop the leak until August at the earliest. But Skocpol is a political science professor, not a scientist. Her answer is based entirely on politics and not on any knowledge of what is and is not possible beyond what BP has told her.

I don’t dispute that from a purely political perspective, the administration taking ownership and responsibility for stopping this disaster by deposing BP  is risky if the government doesn’t actually produce better results than BP is saying they can (and to this point, they have produced no results). And yes, as Skocpol says, the administration should be doing a lot to hold BP financially and criminally accountable, while simultaneously dealing with the on-surface consequences of the oil spill in the Gulf. This isn’t a two-front war, it’s a three-front war and ignoring the third front only ensures that the job is harder on the other two fronts. And that the Gulf is turned into a wasteland for decades.

I really don’t care about the politically expedient response from the government. I care about the morally necessary response and the ecologically required urgency that action be taken. All of BP’s efforts have failed and while I am not a geologist or oceanographer or deep-sea drilling expert and therefore do not myself know what else can be done, I believe the size, power, and treasury of the US government is capable of finding another way to try to solve this problem.