President Obama will give his first press conference today since February — or July — depending on how one defines “press conference.”

The press conference, along with tomorrow’s visit to the Gulf Coast, will be instrumental for the administration, as it needs to project an image and show results that display it is in control of the situation.

Writes the Washington Post‘s Jonathan Capehart:

I want to hear definitively how he is holding BP financially and legally accountable for this disaster. He must lay out the goals and timeline of the special commission he formed last week to investigate what happened. And he has to convince the American people that the lax leadership at the Mineral Management Service is over. A good way to demonstrate this is by announcing that the agency’s invisible chief, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, has been shown the door.

As Manny Ortiz, senior lobbyist at Washington D.C. agency Quinn, Gillespie & Associates told PRNewser yesterday, “the perception problem now is that everyone agrees BP is bad, but what is [the administration] doing to fix it?”