With each passing day that oil sloshes up along beaches and creeps into marshes along the Gulf Coast, the BP offshore leak moves closer to fulfilling nightmare predictions of ecological disaster.

But it is also quickly becoming a political calamity for the Obama administration which -- despite near-daily hyperbole about keeping its "boot on the neck" of BP -- acknowledged yesterday it remains almost entirely dependent on the London-based company to staunch the flow of oil.

Even as the White House stressed the "best minds" of the U.S. government are engaged in trying to devise plans to fix the ruptured well, officials conceded the job will not get done unless the long-odds plans being hatched by BP engineers are somehow successful.

"I do think it's important to understand that this is a highly technical undertaking in terms of closing this well," Carol Browner, the White House director of climate change and energy policy, said in one of a series of interviews yesterday.

"BP does have the technology. They're the ones who understand how the [remotecontrolled] robots work. They're the ones who understand how the [deepwater] vessels work."

The Obama administration will be keenly aware of criticism and the need to avoid comparisons with the administration of George W. Bush for its slow and mismanaged approach to Hurricane Katrina when the storm hit Louisiana.

But on Monday, in a statement that recalled the desperate pleas for help of New Orleans officials after Katrina, Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana's Mississippi River Delta, said, "There is no master plan. There's nobody taking charge. The President of the United States has to step up to the plate. We're begging him."

Mr. Nungesser concluded that Mr. Obama "cares about us" but said the U.S. Coast Guard and BP officials have been acting "like a bunch of kids pointing the finger at each other" over who is to blame for the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion.

"Step up to the plate. We need leadership right now. We don't need a blame game."

The U.S. President had been applauded for an aggressive early response to the oil spill. Aware that public opinion may be shifting, the White House announced yesterday that Mr. Obama would visit Louisiana's Gulf Coast on Friday -- his second trip in a month.

The Obama administration has struggled to be consistent in its dealings with -- and statements about -- BP. It has heaped criticism on the company one day and claimed a good working relationship the next.

The tensions have been most evident in a dispute between BP and the Environmental Protection Agency over the use of a toxic dispersant to break up the expanding oil slick into smaller particles.

BP balked at an EPA order that it find an alternative to a dispersant called Corexit, telling the federal regulator that there was no other product available in enough quantities to be effective.

Despite the Obama administration's insistence it has authority over BP's decisions, the company continues to frustrate lawmakers' calls for transparency.

The extent of the U.S. government's dependence on BP became clear earlier this week when Interior Secretary Ken Salazar threatened to "push them out of the way" if the company did not follow orders from the administration.

To which U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who heads the federal response to the oil crisis, responded that the U.S. military and government frankly lacked the equipment and expertise about deepwater offshore drilling to end the crisis.

"Well, to push BP out of the way, it would raise a question: Replace them with what?" he said.

http://www.nationalpost.com/m/story.html?id=3070764&s=Today%27s%20Newspaper