By Maggie Astor

Two months ago, BP’s “Deepwater Horizon” offshore drilling rig exploded, setting off the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. Oil continues to pour into the Gulf of Mexico and onto the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.

While the brunt of public fury has rightly fallen on BP, quite a bit of blame has been pinned on President Obama as well. This is not entirely surprising, given the time-honored American tradition of blaming the federal government for almost everything. But we could do with a more levelheaded look not only at what Obama can realistically accomplish here, but also at where he fits in the long history of presidential responses to environmental disasters — specifically, how his response compares to that of George H.W. Bush to the 1989 Exxon-Valdez.

After Deepwater Horizon, Exxon-Valdez is the second-worst spill to have occurred on U.S. territory, dumping 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound. Then-President Bush’s response was astonishingly muted: he did not publicly criticize the Exxon executives responsible for the spill; he did not reach out to the fishermen whose livelihoods had been destroyed; he did not even visit the site to see the damage firsthand. In fact, as oil ravaged the Alaskan coastline, Bush did essentially nothing. His transportation secretary, Samuel Skinner, went so far as to call government involvement in the cleanup “counterproductive.”

By contrast, Obama has blasted BP for its negligence and visited the Gulf multiple times to assess the response. He has also deployed 17,500 National Guardsmen, 20,000 other workers, and 1,900 boats to the Gulf to assist in the cleanup — a response Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria calls “the largest response to an environmental disaster in American history.”  He has not accepted direct responsibility for cleaning up the spill, because that is not within the capacity of the federal government to do, but he has maintained a strong and very public oversight role.

The fact of the matter is, it is not the Fed’s responsibility to clean up the Gulf, any more than it was its responsibility to clean up Prince William Sound. That responsibility was Exxon’s in 1989, and it is BP’s today — both because it was the oil companies, not the government, that caused the spills, and because the government has neither the technical knowledge nor the technical capacity to remedy them. As Admiral Thad Allen, who is in charge of the federal part of the effort, put it in response to calls for the government to replace the bumbling BP on the cleanup frontlines, “Replace them with what? … To work down there, you need remotely operated vehicles. You need to do very technical work at 5,000 feet. You need equipment and expertise that’s not generally within the … federal government in terms of competency, capability, or capacity.”

The President’s true responsibilities are threefold: to keep enough political pressure on BP to force it to clean up the spill as quickly and thoroughly as possible; to ensure that BP pays every claim it owes; and to establish regulations that will prevent a disaster like this from ever happening again. Obama is doing as much as can be expected in the first two areas, though there is room for improvement in the third.

On April 30, the White House announced that it is halting all new offshore drilling in U.S. waters until there’s an “adequate review” of a massive 600-mile-wide oil slick that has begun to drift into Louisiana’s wetlands.  If President Obama will not halt offshore drilling altogether, he should at the very least mandate that oil companies’ disaster contingency plans be carefully reviewed before the government rubber-stamps them (BP’s so-called plan listed dead experts and concluded that an oil spill would not seriously harm walruses, sea otters, sea lions, or seals, none of which can be found in the Gulf of Mexico), and he should also forbid companies from taking risky cost-saving shortcuts offshore, as BP did.

A year after Exxon-Valdez, Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which mandated that the party responsible for a spill pay for the cleanup and damage claims, required widespread oil spill contingency plans, and promoted double-hulled ships to reduce the volume of oil spills.  Something similar, though preferably stronger, is called for today, such as stronger measures to prevent such disasters, and faster, more effective responses when they do take place.

The $20 billion escrow account that Obama forced BP to establish in mid-June was a huge step past what Bush did. Twenty-one years after the Exxon-Valdez spill, many of the victims still have yet to see a dime in compensation, and hundreds have died waiting.  Two months after the BP spill, according to a statement on its website , BP had issued more than 31,000 checks, totaling $104 million, to affected residents. This is but a small fraction of the number of claims that have been filed and will be filed in the weeks and months to come, but it is a far more auspicious start than we saw with Exxon — and it’s not happening out of the goodness of BP’s heart. It’s happening because the pressure from the federal government is great enough that BP has been forced to process claims quickly.

Obama’s oversight could be more stringent, but the problem is with the extent of his response, not its nature or scope. Cleaning up the spill is BP’s job, and the federal government can’t do it even if it wants to. Its role is to keep the pressure on so that BP cannot slink back into the shadows with the Gulf still tainted and its executives’ pockets full of money that should have gone to the victims — in other words, what Exxon did.

Everyone is frustrated. Everyone wants to see the leak plugged, the Gulf cleaned, and all the victims compensated. Everyone wants to see less talk and more action. Anger is more than warranted, but it belongs on BP’s shoulders, not Obama’s.

Maggie Astor is a journalist and a student at Barnard College.