The Seven Biggest Oil-Spill Questions Obama Faces Tonight

Tonight at 8 pm, President Obama will give one of his patented Big Speeches about the oil debacle in the Gulf—only this one will be his first-ever address from the Oval Office. The backdrop's no accident. Presidents typically only resort to Oval Office speeches when, as John Dickerson notes, they're "responding to an immediate crisis [or] trying to change the dynamic of an ongoing one." And this address falls into the latter category. The public thinks Obama's been way too cuddly with BP, while badly-needed energy legislation is sputtering in the Senate. Something has to change, and fast. So what can he say? Here are some of the big questions he'll be confronting:

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 It'll be interesting to see how Obama divvies up blame for the spill. There's growing evidence that BP took plenty of shortcuts in drilling the Macondo well, putting cost first and safety second. But government regulators deserve a sound lashing, too—for years, the Minerals Management Service has been way too cozy with the oil companies it was supposed to oversee, and Ken Salazar's plan to bust up the agency into two parts may not be radical enough. A deeper problem, as James Surowiecki argues in The New Yorker, has been that over the past 30 years the very idea of strong regulation has become de-legitimized.

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It's less clear that there are a lot of brilliant ideas on this score. The Center for American Progress recommends putting the National Guard in charge of mopping up the oil (and planning for hurricane season, since a well-placed tropical storm will blow a lot of that sludge deep inland, killing off the Gulf marshlands). Likewise, a central clearinghouse for all the oil-spill information might come in handy—it's obvious that BP, which has consistently lied about how much oil was spewing out of the sea floor, can't be trusted to manage the info on this crisis. Still, there's no way to soft-pedal this: The spill is going to take a long time to contain, it's going to poison a lot of fisheries and coral reefs, and the crude's going to stick around for years, as it did after the ExxonValdez accident. There's only so much that "getting tough" on BP can accomplish here.

Who pays for this mess? Under current law, BP has to pay all the cleanup costs, but only $75 million in indirect damages (which includes, for instance, wiping out the livelihood of shrimp farmers along the coast). Obama could call on Congress to lift this liability cap. Administration officials have also been talking about forcing BP to open an escrow account as big as $20 billion to compensate victims in the Gulf, instead of using that money to dole out scheduled dividends to BP shareholders.