A McCain weakness

Ross Douthat is right:

This has always, always been a problem for McCain: His strongest instinct, when confronted with any domestic-policy problem, is to find a black hat to pin the blame on and then punish them for it, rather than looking for the smartest possible solution. And in a crisis that nobody really understands, and where the blame for what's happened runs through Main Street as well as Wall Street as Washington, McCain's usual "punish the bad guys" message just doesn't seem like what voters want to hear.

McCain should pin blame (rightly) on the Democrats for Fannie Mae and the Community Reinvestment Act, and on Wall Street for too-clever-by-half financial engineering, and then say something like: "Let's have some real straight talk. Irresponsible borrowers helped bring this on, as well. But the key thing now is to fix it."