WASHINGTON — Senator McCain is calling for a meeting of the nation’s top mortgage lenders as part of a solution to the rise in home foreclosures, saying the bankers should look to the example of General Motors, which offered 0% financing on new cars after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

“We need a similar response by the mortgage lenders,” Mr. McCain, the likely Republican nominee for the presidency, said. “They’ve been asking the government to help them out. I’m now calling on them to help their customers, and their nation.”

The proposal drew immediate criticism from economists, who said the situation with GM in 2001 is not comparable to the current crisis.

“That was GM’s initiative,” an economist and a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, David Henderson, said, noting that the decision to offer what was effectively a discount did not come from government pressure.

Other economists pointed out that GM’s financing plan served the company’s interest as much, if not more, than it did the nation’s by enabling it to sell off excess inventory and prepare for the stock of next year’s models. “In a capitalistic economy, it’s the profit motive that matters most,” the chief economist at Moody’s Investors Service, John Lonski, said.

Mr. McCain’s decision to wade into economic policy — an area where he has said he is less knowledgeable than he is on military issues or foreign policy — came the day after Senator Clinton delivered a major policy address on the topic. His solutions stopped short of the $30 billion bailout fund, five-year halt to adjustable rate mortgage resets, and 90-day foreclosure moratorium that she had called for, but in some sense his approach was similar to hers. Both said they were not proposing a “bailout,” but both said they did not think a purely free market approach was the way to go. “In this crisis, as in all I may face in the future,” Mr. McCain said, “I will not allow dogma to override common sense.”

In his campaign speech, the Arizona senator said he would “not play election year politics” with the issue.

“I have always been committed to the principle that it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers,” Mr. McCain said.

While he said he would consider “any and all proposals based on their costs and benefits,” he ruled out options that would aid speculators, landlords, or buyers of second homes.

Economists also reacted coolly to Mr. McCain’s other prescriptions, noting their similarity to measures the Bush administration had already put forward through Hope Now alliance initiative, announced in December. “I don’t think these proposals from the presumptive Republican nominee did much to boost confidence in either the economy or the housing market,” Mr. Lonski said.

Mr. Henderson said they were “better than Hillary Clinton, but that’s not saying a lot.”

Democrats pounced on Mr. McCain’s speech as lacking concrete solutions and advocating inaction in the face of a crisis. “It sounds remarkably like Herbert Hoover, and I don’t think that’s a good economic policy,” Mrs. Clinton told reporter in Pennsylvania. “Inaction has contributed to the problems we face today, and I think further inaction would exacerbate those problems.”

Mrs. Clinton’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Obama, said: “It’s deeply troubling that John McCain is suggesting that the best way to address the housing crisis is to sit back and watch it happen — which is just further evidence that he would continue President Bush’s failed economic policies.”

Advisers to Mr. McCain characterized his speech as providing a roadmap to the principles that he believes should drive any government assistance. And while he spoke out against a bailout, they said he was supportive of the actions the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department have taken to date, including the Fed’s move to put up $30 billion to rescue Bear Stearns from collapse last week. They underscored that he was articulating a vastly different philosophy from either of his potential Democratic opponents. Mr. McCain’s chief economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, called Mrs. Clinton’s proposal for a $30 billion federal housing aid package for states and localities a “slush fund,” and he called her plans for a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures and a five-year freeze of interest rates for subprime mortgages “a dangerous place to go.”

In his speech, Mr. McCain placed blame for the housing crisis on lenders who let standards fall too low and on borrowers who bought homes they couldn’t afford. He said minimum down payment requirements should be raised, and he called for more transparency, “so that every borrower knows exactly what he is agreeing to and where every lender is required to meet the highest standards of ethical behavior.”

His words drew praise from Alex Pollock, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who has proposed and designed a single-page form for all mortgages. “He couldn’t be more right about that,” Mr. Pollock said. “The principles he enunciated are quite good.”