Stop whining!

Phil Gramm, former adviser to economically illiterate John McCain.

On Tuesday near the Republican National Convention, he told the Financial Services Roundtable, a lobbying group for the banking industry, “If you’re sitting here today, you’re not economically illiterate and you’re not a whiner, so I’m not worried about who you’re going to vote for,” according to Bloomberg news service.

Like I said, former adviser to economically illiterate John McCain.

After the July comment, Mr. Gramm had to forfeit his role as the co-chairman of the McCain campaign. Even so, a senior McCain adviser said privately that Mr. Gramm, an economic conservative who is now a vice chairman for UBS Investment Bank and a former Senate Banking Committee chairman, could well be Treasury secretary in a McCain administration. He can’t be helping himself by whining again about American whiners.

Asked for a comment on the latest Gramm remark, McCain campaign spokesman Jill Hazelbaker e-mailed back: “As is well-documented, he resigned from the campaign in July.”

“He had no role in the V.P. selection process, obviously, since he has no role in the campaign,” Ms. Hazelbaker added later.

Yet Bloomberg reported that Mr. Gramm also defended the campaign’s vetting of Sarah Palin to be Mr. McCain’s running mate by saying, “We went through a process of vetting all possible candidates.”