On Friday President Bush signed the desperate, pork-laden Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, and the supposedly rescued stock market continued its fall. Anyone who's watched this dispiriting debacle and who remembers Ronald Reagan and Bill Buckley with admiration has to be wrestling with the Big Question: What's happened to conservatism?

Dozens of undecided voters may have unwittingly answered the question Thursday night. Gathered by pollster Frank Luntz for Fox News, these voters registered their favorable or unfavorable reactions on hand-held electronic meters moment by moment through the vice-presidential debate.

A similar group -- all undecided, equally split between George W. Bush and John Kerry in 2004 -- had watched the late-September presidential debate and overwhelmingly favored Barack Obama afterward. This time the group chose Sarah Palin the winner with equal fervor, and the moment that provoked the highest positive reactions from both Republicans and Democrats came as Ms. Palin addressed the economic crisis:

"We need to make sure that as individuals we're taking personal responsibility through all this," she said. "It's not the American people's fault that the economy is hurting like it is, but we have an opportunity to learn a heck of a lot of good lessons ... and say, 'Never again will we be taken advantage of.' "

Though her words seem to contain a contradiction -- we're taking personal responsibility/it's not our fault -- listeners obviously got the full message, and it resonated with them. Indignant phrases like "we're mad as hell" and "we all feel very angry about what's going on right now" and "it was a 9/11 moment" tumbled out again and again.

What they understand viscerally is that a small group of irresponsible borrowers, greedy lenders and craven politicians engineered an economic fiasco that threatens the rest of us. Most of us pay our mortgages and bills, but we're getting stuck with an enormous tab. Across the entire political spectrum, we resent it.

Since individual responsibility is a constant -- and clearly appealing -- thread of conservative thought, why isn't the Republican ticket more forcefully making this case?

When John McCain did so at the first presidential debate, he, too, scored his highest positive ratings from the bipartisan, undecided focus group. They responded when he criticized a Washington/Wall Street culture in which "failure to carry out our responsibility is rewarded" and when he promised in his administration "people are going to be held accountable."

But as a candidate right now, he refuses to. "Now is not the time to fix the blame; it's time to fix the problem," he said during the bailout talks. His Democratic opponents, however, have boldly fixed the blame on Republicans' love of "deregulation."

Mr. McCain needs to set aside his bipartisan vanities and respond to the leftists' destructive, misleading accusations with the partisan truth: The subprime mortgage mess is primarily the result of left-wing wishes becoming political practice.

Believing that every adult can and should be a homeowner and that failure to be one is a sign of discrimination, Clinton administration officials changed both government rules and market standards, pressuring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to back loans to un-creditworthy buyers the free market would not approve, in amounts the free market would not loan, creating risk levels the market would not accept.

In 2004, when the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight issued a scathing report on Fannie and Freddie's abysmal situation, Democrats raged at the warning. Rep. Barney Frank asserted, "I don't see anything in this report that raises safety and soundness problems."

Last week, Mr. Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd (Congress's top recipient of Fannie/Freddie donations; Mr. Obama is third) were leading the bailout effort. That's a lot like letting the foxes clean up the henhouse, post-slaughter.

And the taxpayers are paying for the farce.

So what happened to conservatism? Republicans "happened," failing as the majority party to limit government's ill-advised role as a market player and to strengthen its role as cautious regulator. Now they're failing by refusing to "fix the blame."

Conservatives and true liberals call for equality of opportunity, while leftists insist on equality of outcome. Economic conservatives practice private charity to ameliorate natural human inequalities, while leftists call for government redress. The triumph of left-wing politics contributed mightily to the subprime mortgage mess. It won't get fixed, nor will similar crises be prevented, by more of the same failed thinking.

Voters across the spectrum have demonstrated that's what they want: accountability and prevention. It's a winning combination for Republicans and conservatives, two groups that don't always overlap.