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For a while, it seems to us, the hue and cry surrounding the country's current housing/credit crisis has lacked a bit of candor.

Lots of blame has befallen unscrupulous lenders, speculators and entities right on up the financial-sector food chain — for writing loans that took advantage of overeager borrowers plus the collateral wheeling and dealing in subprime loans that ended up biting the industry in the backside.

True all. And Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are all over the bad guys, pledging the federal government to the fray with foreclosure moratoriums, five-year mortgage-rate freezes, greater transactional transparency to keep people from being hoodwinked and billions in assistance funding for a vague notion dubbed homeowner assistance.

But besides the big-government, price-control tone inherent in some of these proposals, there's a missing element: Americans who got in over their heads foolishly, greedily or recklessly, believing a rising housing market would cover their upwardly adjusting mortgages.

Neither Clinton nor Obama has talked much about personal responsibility or the propriety of the feds essentially bailing out those who in some cases have only themselves to blame. Enter Sen. John McCain.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee weighed in this week, talking about "rampant speculation” in the credit markets as the root of the crisis. Lenders are to blame for lowering standards amid a housing boom, he said, as well as speculators who built financial houses of cards on a foundation of shaky loans.

But McCain also said homeowners bought houses they couldn't afford, believing rising prices would let them refinance later at better rates. He said it isn't the "duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers.”

McCain said accountants should review the valuing of real estate and related assets and encourage lenders to voluntarily help good-risk borrowers who might be temporarily cash poor. He wouldn't endorse a Bush administration proposal to lower or eliminate downpayment requirements for Federal Housing Administration-backed loans, which makes sense because easy loans helped create the current mess.

That's certainly no lollipop on the election-year hustings, which surely is behind the treats Clinton and Obama would dispense. McCain's restraint prompted the invocation of Herbert Hoover's ghost by Clinton, while Obama said the Republican's crisis response is to "sit back and watch it happen.”

Unfortunately, New Deal-like government interventionism too often is the Democrats' default setting. In McCain there's a contrast, a sobering one, but welcome to taxpayers not quite so eager to pick up the tab for others' irresponsibility.

New Deal-like government interventionism too often is the Democrats' default setting.