[CptSternn]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/us...l?ref=business

BELLEVILLE, Mich. — Senator John McCain has spent the week trying to tell people that he feels their economic pain. So it was more than a little unhelpful when one of his top economic advisers was quoted Thursday as saying that the United States was only in a “mental recession” and that it had become a “nation of whiners.”

The adviser, former Senator Phil Gramm, Republican of Texas, sought to clarify his remarks Thursday by saying he had been referring only to some of the nation’s leaders.

But it was too late to keep from complicating things for Mr. McCain, who has been trying to strike a more empathetic tone after sometimes struggling to maintain a balance between displays of optimism about the nation’s future and demonstrating an understanding of Americans’ economic hardships.

Senator Barack Obama, noting that Mr. McCain had previously said an expansion of offshore oil drilling might have a “psychological” benefit for the country, seized on Mr. Gramm’s remarks, made in an interview with The Washington Times.

“You know, America already has one Dr. Phil,” Mr. Obama said at a campaign stop in Fairfax, Va. “When it comes to the economy, we don’t need another.”

Mr. McCain himself repudiated Mr. Gramm’s comments.

“The person here in Michigan that just lost his job isn’t suffering a mental recession,” he told reporters after a town-hall-style meeting at a factory in this city west of Detroit.

And when he was asked whether Mr. Gramm — McCain campaign co-chairman, UBS Investment Bank vice chairman and former economics professor — might serve as treasury secretary in a McCain administration, the candidate replied with a flash of his sometimes tart humor.

“I think Senator Gramm would be in serious consideration for ambassador to Belarus,” he said, “although I’m not sure the citizens of Minsk would welcome that.”

Mr. McCain has been spending the week in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan pushing his economic proposals and trying to show a grasp of workers’ financial struggles.

During the gathering here Thursday, held at Bayloff Stamped Products, which provides metal components to car manufacturers, he tried to fend off the skepticism of some Michigan workers about his support for free trade and said more than half a dozen times that people were “hurting.”

“America is hurting today,” he said. “Michigan is hurting today. The automotive industry is hurting. And we’ve got big problems, and we’ve got big challenges.”

Questioned about manufacturers’ moving their plants elsewhere because of free trade, he replied, “I have to tell you — and I know that it’s not popular — I do believe in the overall benefits of free trade.”

In recent months Mr. McCain has recalibrated the way he talks about the economy, often noting that it does not matter whether the technical definition of a recession has been met, given that so many people feel as if they are in one. The tone is in contrast with the one he struck during the primaries, when he sometimes placed more emphasis on optimism.

His struggle to find a balance was on vivid display at a Republican debate in January, when he was asked whether the country was better off now than it was eight years ago.

“I think you could argue that Americans over all are better off,” he replied, “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.” Then he added: “But let’s have some straight talk. Things are tough right now.”

At the factory gathering Thursday, Mr. McCain repeated a statement that was used against him to great effect in the Michigan primary, which he lost to Mitt Romney.

“I’ll look at you in the eye again and I’ll tell you that there are some jobs that won’t come back,” he said.

But, the optimism hardly out of reach, he added that the lost jobs would be replaced with new ones to create more environmentally friendly technologies and other innovations.

“I have to tell you that the innovation and the technology and the entrepreneurship of the world still lies in the United States of America,” he said. “Every technological advance we’ve made in the 21st century and throughout the 20th has come from the United States of America.”