James Carville, a stalwart Obama defender — and Louisiana native — and MSNBC’s Chris Mathews both voiced concerns about the president’s handling of the spill, and Obama’s decision to allow BP to take the lead on plugging the pipe, which has been pouring oil into the sea for a month.

Their statements came on a day when the press corps spent the better part of an hour grilling White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the administration’s response to the Deepwater Horizons disaster — and the cloud of confusion over the amount of oil spilling from the severed exploration pipe and BP’s efforts to staunch the flow.

Matthews, speaking during an appearance with Jay Leno on NBC’s “Tonight Show,” said Obama’s response “scares me. He’s been acting a little like a Vatican Observer here. When is he actually going to do something?”

Carville, one of the President Bush’s harshest critics in the wake of the 2005 hurricane that decimated New Orleans, called Obama’s response “lackadaisical.”

“They are risking everything by this ‘go along with BP’ strategy they have that seems like, lackadaisical on this,” Carville told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Friday. “They seem like they’re inconvenienced by this, this is some giant thing getting in their way and somehow or another, if you let BP handle it, it’ll all go away. It’s not going away. It’s growing out there. It is a disaster of the first magnitude, and they’ve got to go to Plan B.”

He also said the White House needs to get tougher with BP.

“I think they actually believe that BP has some kind of a good motivation here,” he said. “They’re naive! BP is trying to save money, save everything they can... They won’t tell us anything, and oddly enough, the government seems to be going along with it! Somebody has got to, like shake them and say, ‘These people don’t wish you well! They’re going to take you down!’”

In the earliest days of the crisis, the White House pushed back hard against any suggestion the government was slow off the mark in recognizing the severity of the problem and putting a response in place. The White House has also stepped up efforts to ensure BP will pay for the cleanup and envionrmental damage. But more recently, Obama has acknowledged that his adminsitration bears some of the blame for the crisis — even though the White House has stood by its contention that its BP’s job to fix the leak.

At the White House Friday, Chip Reid of CBS asked Gibbs why the federal government was standing by “as a spectator” as BP tried various strategies to block the spill. Gibbs bristled.

“Chip, there’s nothing that would denote that the federal government has stood there and hoped for the best. I mean, the premise of your question doesn’t match any single... action that our government has undertaken since the call came in that this rig had exploded in the Gulf.”

But a half dozen reporters chimed in peppering Gibbs with questions — questioning if the government had done everything in its legal power to force BP’s hand, including nationalization of the effort. Gibbs said the administration was doing everything legally — and “humanly” possible — to stop the leak.