After a weekend of watching John McCain's campaign try to distance itself from campaign co-chair and top economic advisor Phil Gramm, the Democratic National Committee today released a new video highlighting the inseparable link between McCain and Gramm. Called "John McCain & Phil Gramm: It's All In Your Head," the new video shows McCain repeatedly praising Gramm's judgment on the economy and echoing Gramm's claim that the economic challenges facing America's working families are "psychological."

The video also shows that, despite Carly Fiorina's claim on Meet the Press that Phil Gramm doesn't speak for John McCain, Gramm was in fact speaking for McCain at the Wall Street Journal editorial page on the same day McCain was saying otherwise. In reality, Phil Gramm was a key architect of the economic agenda John McCain is trying to sell on the campaign trail and a key component of his effort to win over skeptical conservatives. McCain even cites the advice he gets from Gramm as an example of why voters shouldn't be worried about McCain's admission that the economy is something he doesn't understand as well as he should.

Despite Fiorina's battle with the facts, the weekend wasn't a complete loss for the McCain campaign's credibility, with one surrogate managing to give some long overdue straight talk. Asked on CNN's Late Edition to come up with a single economic difference between President Bush and John McCain, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford stumbled around for more than a minute before settling on the correct answer: there are none. [Huffington Post, 7/13/08: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/13/mark-sanford-draws-a-blan_n_112... ]

"John McCain's campaign may be scrambling to throw Gramm under the straight talk express bus, but they can't change the fact that Phil Gramm, John McCain and George Bush all offer the same failed, out of touch economic agenda that has left America's working families struggling to deal with a real economic crisis," said DNC spokeswoman Karen Finney. "John McCain doesn't understand that American families struggling to keep their homes and jobs while paying more for everything from gas to groceries don't need a 'psychological' boost. They need real plans for getting our economy back on track, not four more years of the failed McCain-Gramm-Bush policies that created this mess in the first place."