Here’s your quote of the day, courtesy of John McCain’s good buddy, Phil Gramm.
“You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession,” he said, noting that growth has held up at about 1 percent despite all the publicity over losing jobs to India, China, illegal immigration, housing and credit problems and record oil prices. “We may have a recession; we haven’t had one yet.”
“We have sort of become a nation of whiners,” he said. “You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline” despite a major export boom that is the primary reason that growth continues in the economy, he said.
I wonder if any of those whiners would describe themselves as being bitter? Maybe we could have a week-long media feeding frenzy to find out. Of course, Gramm was just taking a cue from McCain, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
TPM Election Central and Texas on the Potomac have more. And I love this quote on TPM:
I’m not even sure I know what it means to say you don’t agree with your chief economic advisor’s comments about the economy. If he is McCain’s chief economic advisor, what good is he?
Yeah, I know McCain isn’t obliged to take all of his advice but on something as critical as the state of the US economy wouldn’t you think he’s advising McCain on what the problems and solutions are?
So if he hasn’t told McCain he thinks the economic problems are all in our head what has he told him? If a candidates chief adviser differs so much from the candidate what value is he to McCain?
Yes, well, that’s what you get for having a charlatan like Phil Gramm on your team in the first place.
Didn’t Phil Gramm, when he was running for president, used to say regularly on the campaign stump that he flunked the 9th grade (and a couple other grades, too?)