On Wednesday, Senator John McCain, Republican nominee for president, explained a plan he announced during Tuesday’s presidential debate a bit further. The plan, he said during the debate, would aim at helping homeowners in trouble.

The Senator said today that “if elected president, I will direct my Treasury Secretary to implement an American Homeownership Resurgence Plan to keep families in their homes, avoid foreclosures, save failing neighborhoods, stabilize the housing market and attack the roots of our financial crisis.”  

 ”America’s families are bearing a heavy burden from falling housing prices, mortgage delinquencies, foreclosures, and a weak economy. It is important that those families who have worked hard enough to finance homeownership not have that dream crushed under the weight of the wrong mortgage,” McCain said in a statement.

“For those that cannot make inflated payments or their mortgage exceeds the value of their home, mortgages must be re-structured to put losses on the books and put homeowners in manageable mortgages.”

The Resurgance Plan proposed by him, McCain went on to say, “would purchase mortgages directly from homeowners and mortgage servicers, and replace them with manageable, fixed-rate mortgages that will keep families in their homes.” This will, he explained, “eliminate uncertainty over defaults, support the value of mortgage-backed derivatives and alleviate risks that are freezing financial markets.”

McCain’s announcement of the American Homeownership Resurgence Plan comes at a moment when he is trailing Obama by as much as 11% in the polls. The main reason for Obama’s big lead is that most Americans (59%) believe he is better able to deal with the economy, and has better plans to help them come through the difficult months, possibly years, ahead. McCain’s plan is clearly aimed at trying to offer Americans an alternative by showing that McCain too is willing to use the power of the government to help protect them from a collapse of the financial markets specifically, and the economy generally.

Although McCain hopes to reach out to moderate and undecided voters with his plan, he may very well alienate the conservative base of the Republican Party, however. Well read bloggers and columnists such as Michelle Malkin criticized his plan during and immediately after yesterday’s debate, indicating they do not believe that the government has the solutions for the current problems facing America. Several columnists for the conservative National Review Online, meanwhile, argued that McCain’s “big government” solutions would not help him win the elections; these columnists and pundits believe that McCain has to come up with small government solutions, not big government solutions. If people can choose between two big government solutions, these critics argue, they will vote for the person representing the “big government party.”