Facing criticism from both the left and right for his administration’s response to the Gulf oil spill, today President Obama plans to announce a six-month moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling while an investigation into the spill is conducted, according to multiple reports.

Along with the six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling operations, the president is also expected to announce the delay or cancellation of projects off the coasts of Virginia and Alaska, where new drilling was set to begin this summer.

The decision to halt offshore drilling in areas is a reversal of an earlier policy proposal, which called for increased offshore drilling as part of a larger energy bill. Under that plan, large areas of the nation’s Atlantic coastline, the eastern portion of the Gulf of Mexico and large swaths of the northern Alaskan coastline would be opened to oil and natural gas drilling for the first time in three decades.

At the time, the environmental groups were not impressed, predicting that negatives would surely outweigh the positives.

“Drilling our coasts will do nothing to lower gas prices or create energy independence,” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said in a statement. “It will only jeopardize beaches, marine life, and coastal tourist economies, all so the oil industry can make a short-term profit.”

Sure enough, with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill leaking as much as 4.2 million gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico for over a month now, and little progress made to stop the leak, the final ecological and economic impacts are unknown. On Sunday, BP said that it had already spent $786 million on clean up efforts.

The damage to the fishing and tourism industry in the Gulf states is also unknown, but expected to be extremely high. Already the spill has caused the closure of more than 54,000 square miles of federal waters and Louisiana state waters to commercial fishing. In 2009, Louisiana’s commercial fishing industry generated $2.4 billion and 27,000 jobs. And while hotels along the coast have been filled with relief workers, hotel reservations in the Gulf states are down 25 to 30 percent, suggesting a major drop off in tourist activity.

While BP has been roundly criticized for its role in the disaster, so too has the president and his administration. The administration has basically left the cleanup to BP, which some critics have viewed as an example of the president passing the buck on a problem that requires all hands on deck. Karl Rove, former presidential adviser to George Bush, has even called the disaster “Obama’s Katrina.”

“BP’s well was drilled in federal waters,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal column. “Washington, not Louisiana, is in charge. This is Mr. Obama’s responsibility. He says his administration has been prepared for the worst from the start. Mr. Obama’s failure to lead in cleaning up the spill could lead voters to echo his complaint in Katrina’s aftermath: ‘I wish that the federal government had been up to the task.’”

But Obama’s critics are not only those on the right. Even former Clinton White House advisor and Democratic strategist James Carville had tough words for the president.

“He could be commandeering tankers and making BP bring tankers in and clean this up. They could be deploying people to the coast right now,” he said recently on ABC’s Good Morning America. “He could be with the Corps of Engineers and the Coast Guard…doing something about these regulations. These people are crying, they’re begging for something down here, and it just looks like he’s not involved in this.

“Man, you got to get down here and take control of this! Put somebody in charge of this thing and get this moving! We’re about to die down here!”

To change the perception that the administration has been completely hands off in the response to the spill, Obama plans to take questions from the press on the disaster and travel to the Gulf Coast Friday. However, it could prove to be too little too late.

“Now the slow-moving oil spill threatens Mr. Obama’s reputation, along with 40 percent of America’s sensitive wetlands,” Rove wrote.

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