How would a Republican president have handled the Gulf oil spill?

Plug one leak, and another springs up. That's the lesson the Obama administration is learning after BP successfully capped the oil well that has leaked into the Gulf of Mexico for nearly three months. But now it's not oil that's escaping. It's gas. As November approaches, Republicans are emitting kilotons of hot air over Obama's handling of the clean-up.

"This is mainly a failure of the administration," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Sunday. "BP caused the spill. It's BP's responsibility to plug that leak." But, McConnell said, the federal government has been slow to mop it up. On Fox News, Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana accused Obama of ignoring the spill for political reasons: "I'm afraid he's decided to deal with this issue, at least politically, by not coming back here at all, and trying to move it off the front page rather than dealing with the situation forcefully."

Entertain for a moment the possibility that these Republican criticisms are not mere politics but fair-minded critiques of the administration. What, exactly, would Republicans have done differently, were they the ones in charge?

The biggest difference, based on their public statements, is that they would have mobilized more oil-collecting skimmers sooner. "It took the administration 70 days to order skimmers down to the Gulf," McConnell said on Sunday. Sen. George LeMieux of Florida, the leader of the Skim, Baby, Skim caucus, has been equally frustrated. "We need every resource, domestic and foreign alike, in the Gulf, and we needed them yesterday," he said on the Senate floor June 30. "In fact, we needed them 50 days ago." At the beginning of June, there were still only about 100 skimmers in the Gulf. (There are an estimated 1,600 skimmers available off the coast of the continental United States.) It wasn't until late June that the Coast Guard and the Environmental Protection Agency issued an order freeing up additional skimmers from other parts of the country to deploy to the Gulf Coast. If Obama were serious about the clean-up, Republicans say, he or Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen would have demanded more skimmers sooner.

Then again, a Republican president would have faced the same complications that Obama did. According to the Deepwater Horizon Joint Information Center, the number of skimmers in the Gulf increased by 450, to 550 total, in the month of June, before Allen relaxed the rules that would allow more skimmers. Since then, the number has increased by only 150 more. So the newly relaxed rules haven't made a huge difference so far. Plus, skimmers are just one element of the clean-up. Crews are also using chemical dispersants and controlled burns to get rid of oil. And in many cases, those methods are more effective than skimming, which collects mostly water. The nature of the spill has changed, too. When the leak began, the oil spill was a large, thick, monolithic blob, requiring fewer, larger skimmers. Later, after it was broken up by dispersants into smaller, isolated blotches, many smaller skimmers could collect it more effectively.

Another major plank of a GOP president's clean-up effort would presumably be to waive the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, better known as the Jones Act, which prohibits foreign vessels from making deliveries between American ports. President Bush waived the law in 2005 to allow foreign assistance in New Orleans. Republicans argue that Obama's refusal to waive it has prevented foreign countries from donating vessels and other equipment to help clean up the spill. "There are thousands of ships around the world" that would help, if only Obama would let them, LeMieux told Fox News.

Not quite, says the Department of Homeland Security. Foreign-flagged vessels have been helping out with the clean-up since the very beginning, and in mid-June, the number was up to 15. It's true that the State Department has been slow to accept some offers of foreign assistance: At the end of June, about 80 percent of the international offers made were still "under consideration," according to a State Department count. But the number has since improved, with 66 percent of government offers accepted, according to a different tally by the National Incident Command.