Yesterday, McCain spokeswoman and pollution lobbyist Nancy Pfotenhauer was challenged by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) incoherent claim that the “fundamentals of the economy are strong.” Matthews wanted to know whose economy McCain was talking about:

MATTHEWS: But if you look at all the fundamentals in the employment rate, the debt, the deficit, the price of things, why do you say it’s fundamentally sound? Why is it? It looks to me like it’s getting worse.

PFOTENHAUER: First of all, the problems that you identify are real, and they’re challenges that Sen. McCain talks about every single day on the campaign trail, Chris.

Watch it:

In fact, neither McCain nor his party talks about the fundamentals of the economy with any regularity. A review of the over 38,000 words in the three days of prepared speeches at the Republican National Convention discovers near-complete silence about those economic fundamentals:

DEBT: 0
DEFICIT: 0
UNEMPLOYMENT: 1
INFLATION: 1
PRICES: 16

Sen. McCain, in a 3,976-word speech, mentioned high oil prices once. He did not mention the $9.7 trillion national debt, the $500 billion national trade deficit, the 6.1 percent unemployment rate, or the 5.37 percent inflation rate.

The only mention of “unemployment” comes from multimillionaire investment banker Mitt Romney, who claimed that “higher taxes, bigger government, and less trade” would lead to “moribund growth and double-digit unemployment,” supposedly “the same path Europe took.” The only mention of “inflation” also came from multimillionaire investment banker Mitt Romney: “Is government spending – excluding inflation – liberal or conservative if it doubles since 1980? — It’s liberal!” Read more

In the last few days, the U.S. financial system has been thrown into turmoil by the failure of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, the troubles of insurance giant AIG, and the corresponding drop in the stock market.

This evidently sparked a debate regarding government regulation of the financial markets within the McCain campaign, and McCain just can’t decide which way he wants to have it.

Here is a look at McCain’s back-and-forth on regulation during the last 24 hours:

- Deregulation: McCain issued a statement Monday morning saying that “we cannot tolerate a system that handicaps our markets and our banks.”

- Regulation: McCain’s campaign then put out an ad calling for “tougher rules on Wall Street.”

- Deregulation: This morning, on NBC’s Today Show, McCain said, “Of course, I don’t like excessive and unnecessary government regulation.”

- Regulation: Then, on CBS’s The Early Show, McCain said, “Do I believe in excess government regulation? Yes.”

- Both: On CNBC’s Squawk Box, McCain said, “We don’t want to burden average citizens with over-regulation and government bureaucracy…And I’m proud to be a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, who said, ‘unfettered capitalism leads to corruption,’ and we’ve got to fix this.”

The video of McCain’s morning show flip-flop is available on Think Progress here.

As the New York Times wrote this morning, while McCain has “struck a populist tone” in advocating regulation, “his record on the issue, and the views of those he has always cited as his most influential advisers, suggest that he has never departed in any major way from his party’s embrace of deregulation.” In fact, in 1995, “Mr. McCain promoted a moratorium on federal regulations of all kinds.”

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Our guest blogger is Andrew Jakabovics, Associate Director for the Economic Mobility Program at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) demonstrated again today that he was telling the truth about not knowing much about the economy. For a man concerned about protecting the average American from Wall Street greed, he seemed not to know who plays what role.

During a speech today in Tampa, FL, McCain repeatedly referred to the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, the corporation that “return[s] customers’ cash, stock and other securities” if a brokerage goes bankrupt, and is known as the SIPC — as S-P-I-C. Watch it:

It’s possible that McCain misspoke (twice!) in rattling off what he called “the alphabet soup” of regulators, but the error appeared both times in the prepared text released by the campaign. Which raises the question: does he know what he’s talking about or is he just reading what is put in front of him?

Moving past the verbal gaffe, the more serious problem is that John McCain and his advisors don’t seem to know what SIPC is. In today’s speech, he said:

Too many firms on Wall Street have been able to count on casual oversight by regulatory agencies in Washington. And there are so many of those regulators that the responsibility for oversight is scattered, unfocused and ineffective. Among others, we’ve got the SEC, the CFTC, the FDIC, the SPIC and the OCC. But for all their big and impressive sounding names, the fact is they haven’t been doing their job right, or else we wouldn’t have these massive problems on Wall Street. At their worse, they’ve been caught up in Washington turf wars instead of working together to protect investors and the public interests. And we don’t need a dozen federal agencies doing the job badly — we need the best federal agencies to do the job right.

The problem is, SIPC is not a regulator. Don’t take my word for it, though. Check out the SIPC’s own web site, which states “Though created by the Securities Investor Protection Act (15 U.S.C. §78aaa et seq., as amended), SIPC is neither a government agency nor a regulatory authority. It is a nonprofit, membership corporation, funded by its member securities broker-dealers.”

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