It is almost literally unbelievable.

John McCain, responding to the current economic troubles, says that "Wall Street has betrayed us." He calls the current mess the "result of excess and greed and corruption." He adds,

We've got to make sure that people like Fannie and Freddie, organizations such as Fannie and Freddie, never have the influence again that they had in Washington. You saw it, Joe. The old boy network -- Republicans, Democrats, they had influence with everybody. So therefore, we didn't act to have the sufficient oversight while these organizations grew and grew and became the corrupt institutions that they are today."

Old boy network? Influence? Can't McCain smell the stench of old-boy influence-peddling every time he enters his campaign headquarters? As I noted yesterday, several of McCain's top campaign aides lobbied for Fannie and Freddie. His campaign overall has at least 177 lobbyists working for his campaign. These are people who get paid large amounts of money to win special treatment for corporate interests, public interest be damned.

Then there's Phil Gramm, the onetime chairman of McCain's campaign. As I explained elsewhere, when Gramm chaired the Senate banking committee in 2000, he slipped into a massive must-pass spending bill a piece of legislation totally deregulating the the market for credit default swaps, a little-understood financial instrument. The swaps market then exploded, and the rampant use of unregulated swaps--which function kind of like insurance policies for big financial institutions--helped grease the way for the subprime meltdown.

So whose greed and excess is McCain now decrying? It is the greed and excess of some of the people who have helped run his campaign. His denunciation of influence peddlers, asleep-at-the-switch regulators, and me-first CEOs is absurd, given his own ties to these folks. His most prominent economic policy surrogate is Carly Fiorina, who pocketed $42 million in severance pay and other goodies when she was forced out as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. The question is, how long can McCain get away with this?

Obama has a slight but narrowing edge in the polls when voters are asked who's best able to handle the economy. It's certainly obvious that voters don't review the details of each presidential candidate's economic policy before deciding whom they want in the driver's seat when the economy heads into a ditch. Many voters pick a favorite based on impressions. Right now, McCain is sounding a more populist tone than Obama, whose strategy seems to be to portray McCain as too tied to George W. Bush and too out of touch to be trusted with this hurting economy. So even with McCain stumbling (by declaring the "fundamentals" are strong), McCain looks more like the fighter, the guy who's ready to knock heads together--the heads of the greedy SOBs responsible for this mess--and get things going again with a healthy dose of reform. It's phony populism. It's like the head of a Mafia family decrying a crime wave caused by his own lieutenants. But that doesn't mean it cannot work politically.

In politics, being right doesn't always count. You have to show you can fight. McCain is ignoring reality to position himself as a populist reformer. Obama better burst that bubble.