I think somebody ought to have an ad featuring these McCain quotes from a January 2008 debate running 24/7 —

Q: Are Americans better off than they were eight years ago?

A: You could argue that Americans overall are better off, because we have had a pretty good prosperous time, with low unemployment and low inflation and a lot of good things have happened. A lot of jobs have been created. … We need to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which I voted for twice to do so. … I think we are better off overall if you look at the entire eight-year period, when you look at the millions of jobs that have been created, the improvement in the economy, etc.

This should be juxtaposed with a clip from Dubya’s Tuesday press conference.

He’s not worried.

On a day that saw one economic bombshell after another, President Bush squinted, smirked and grimaced into the future Tuesday, declaring – contrary to a growing mountain of evidence – that the country’s financial system is “basically sound.”

“I’m an optimist,” a sometimes testy Bush said in his first White House news conference since April. “I believe there’s a lot of positive things for our economy.”

Dan Froomkin cites an AP poll that says “by a 2-1 margin, Americans believe McCain would generally continue Bush’s economic policies.”

Harold Meyerson has a must-read column on McCain’s economic policies in today’s WaPo.

… as McCain tries to balance the tattered libertarianism of Reaganomics with the financial exigencies of the moment, he and his campaign have moved beyond inconsistency into utter incoherence. He vows to balance the budget while also cutting corporate taxes and making permanent the Bush tax cuts for the rich — even though the rich and corporations made out like bandits during the Bush “prosperity,” while everyone else’s incomes stagnated. McCain squares this circle by vowing to cut entitlements, a move that would reduce, rather than enhance, consumer purchasing power at a time of economic downturn (or any other time, for that matter).

Whether Americans are even experiencing a downturn has been a matter of some dispute in the McCain camp, since former senator Phil Gramm, until last week one of McCain’s chief surrogates on economic issues, deemed America a nation of “whiners” mistaking subjective insecurity over the economy for an objective economic fact. For McCain, who had the misfortune to be campaigning in Michigan the day that Gramm’s remarks dominated campaign news, Gramm’s insensitivity was appalling. But McCain has never expressed any concern that Gramm wrote the legislation that enabled the $62 trillion credit default swaps market to remain unregulated, which, as David Corn documented in Mother Jones, meant that banks and hedge funds could accumulate liabilities that they could not cover if the markets — most particularly, the subprime mortgage market — went south. To the contrary, McCain has viewed Gramm as one of his economic gurus. “There is no one in America that is more respected on the issue of economics than Senator Phil Gramm,” McCain declared in February. …

…One problem is that McCain himself has no real ideas about how to fix the economy, which leaves his tetherless surrogates free to roam the policy landscape. An even deeper problem is that standard-issue Republican economic policy has run out of plausible mantras. The ritual extolling of markets and denigration of government make no sense at a moment when a conservative Republican administration is rushing to save the markets through governmental intervention.

Or, to use Reagan’s construction: Republican economics is not the solution to our problem; Republican economics is the problem — for our nation, surely, and also for candidate McCain.