It’s always awkward when presidents and candidates are embarrassed by the words and behavior of their own friends.

And such was the case when McCain supporter and surrogate speaker Phil Gramm stated earlier this week that America has become a nation of “whiners.”

Speaking with a small group of media professionals, the former U.S. Senator (and former Presidential Candidate) from Texas spoke about current economic conditions, saying "you've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession."

He went on to note that, despite all the rhetoric about hard times in America, our economy still produced a growth rate of approximately 1 percent last quarter. In the face of all the gloom about losing jobs to India and China, illegal immigrants taking jobs away from U.S. citizens, housing and credit problems, and record oil prices, Gramm pointed out that America is still enjoying a major boom in export business. "We have sort of become a nation of whiners," he said. "You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline…"

Now arguably, one could say that Gramm’s comments point towards the profound reality of the psychological underpinning to people’s economic behavior. If people “think” and “feel” as though times are bad, then they’ll behave, economically and otherwise, as though times are bad.

But that’s not how Gramm’s comments were received. More accurately, he was perceived as being insensitive and “out of touch” about the real hardship and pain that many Americans are facing, and was believed to have been speaking pejoratively about the American people.

McCain himself quickly rebuked Gramm, his longtime friend and the man that he supported for the presidency back in 1996. “Phil Gramm doesn’t speak for me, I speak for me” McCain said sternly. He went on to explain that a laid-off worker or a mother struggling to pay for a child's education "isn't suffering from a mental recession" - - in other words, the suffering is real, and so are our nation’s economic woes.

But lost in the midst of this little fiasco was a question that begs an answer: is Phil Gramm right? Has the United States of America, on some level, become a nation of whiners?

An examination of the rhetoric from this entire presidential campaign cycle would suggest that, to some degree, America is, in some collective sense, inclined toward whining right now. The candidates aren’t whining themselves, so much, but their ideas and proposals suggest that they are playing to an audience of whiners. And that’s not good for anybody - - not the whiners, nor for the rest of us.

Consider the Democratic Primary races. Clinton and Obama both took the “hatred of successful people” sensibilities to new high’s (or new “lows,” depending on how you view it). This was especially odd for Hillary Clinton, who, along with her husband, spent the entire previous decade positioning herself as a “New Democrat” and “Centrist,” and the kind of Democrat who can embrace free trade, upwardly mobile voters, and so forth.

But you would have never known that listening to Hillary and Obama earlier this year. When campaigning in the rust belt states where factory jobs have declined, Obama and Clinton blamed free trade for people’s pain, and vowed to “review” - - that is, deconstruct - - N.A.F.T.A. - - as though eliminating free trade would be the one thing needed to pacify people’s whining.

Obama and Clinton have also both spent a good bit of this year lashing out at “corporate America,” and “fat cat executives” - - another sure indication of whining in America. Why would anybody who wasn’t a whiner be obsessed with the salary of a CEO? And why would anyone at all be offended that a corporation earned a profit?

Corporate profits keep millions of Americans employed and line the retirement portfolios of millions of investors, and executives who manage such corporations deserve the compensation that the corporations’ board of directors have determined as “fair.” But don’t try to tell that to the presidential candidates. There’s to much political gain to be enjoyed by promising to “reign-in executive pay,” and to “tax corporations” even further.

So what if a presidential candidate shot back at this nonsense with some seriously insensitive but painfully truthful “straight talk?” To his credit, McCain has done this to some degree. Even while rebuking Gramm in the economically challenged state of Michigan last week, McCain still had the courage that he believes in the benefits of free trade, despite how unpopular that position might be.

That’s a good start. Now let’s imagine McCain rebuking Obama more succinctly. When Obama laments “rich greedy corporations” (oil corporations or any other), how about challenging Obama on the relative merits of a corporation that continually loses money (can someone say “General Motors?”)? And when Obama vows to get tough on “greedy” and “unscrupulous” mortgage lenders, and to “protect homeowners,” what if somebody - - McCain or someone else - - stood up and sated the obvious: Americans need to be better stewards of their own money! Americans who borrowed more than they should have, should not now look to the government to “fix their problem.” Oh, and by the way, 95% of us homeowners are paying our bills on time, so let’s not limit the scope of opportunity for 95% of us, just so we can coddle the other 5%.

I’d love to hear some of these ideas from Mr. McCain. But they would likely beget more whining.

Only in America could critics of a group called "The Race" be labeled racists. Such is the triumph of left-wing identity chauvinists, whose aggressive activists and supine abettors have succeeded in redefining all opposition as "hate."

Both Barack Obama and John McCain will speak this week in San Diego at the annual conference of the National Council of La Raza, the Latino organization whose name is Spanish for, yes, "The Race." Can you imagine Obama and McCain paying homage to a group of white people who called themselves that? No matter. The presidential candidates and the media have legitimized "The Race" as a mainstream ethnic lobbying group and marginalized its critics as intolerant bigots. The unvarnished truth is that the group is a radical ethnic nationalist outfit that abuses your tax dollars and milks PC politics to undermine our sovereignty.

Here are 15 things you should know about "The Race":

15. "The Race" supports driver's licenses for illegal aliens.

14."The Race" demands in-state tuition discounts for illegal alien students that are not available to law-abiding U.S. citizens and law-abiding legal immigrants.

13. "The Race" vehemently opposes cooperative immigration enforcement efforts between local, state and federal authorities.

12. "The Race" opposes a secure fence on the southern border.

11. "The Race" joined the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in a failed lawsuit attempt to prevent the feds from entering immigration information into a key national crime database -- and to prevent local police officers from accessing the data.

10. "The Race" opposed the state of Oklahoma's tough immigration-enforcement-first laws, which cut off welfare to illegal aliens, put teeth in employer sanctions and strengthened local-federal cooperation and information sharing.

9. "The Race" joined other open-borders, anti-assimilationists and sued to prevent Proposition 227, California's bilingual education reform ballot initiative, from becoming law.

8. "The Race" bitterly protested common-sense voter ID provisions as an "absolute disgrace."

7. "The Race" has consistently opposed post-9/11 national security measures at every turn.

6. Former "Race" president Raul Yzaguirre, Hillary Clinton's Hispanic outreach adviser, said this: "U.S. English is to Hispanics as the Ku Klux Klan is to blacks." He was referring to U.S. English, the nation's oldest, largest citizens' action group dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States. "The Race" also pioneered Orwellian open-borders Newspeak and advised the Mexican government on how to lobby for illegal alien amnesty while avoiding the terms "illegal" and "amnesty."

5. "The Race" gives mainstream cover to a poisonous subset of ideological satellites, led by Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan (MEChA). The late GOP Rep. Charlie Norwood rightly characterized the organization as "a radical racist group ... one of the most anti-American groups in the country, which has permeated U.S. campuses since the 1960s, and continues its push to carve a racist nation out of the American West."

4. "The Race" is currently leading a smear campaign against staunch immigration enforcement leaders and has called for TV and cable news networks to keep immigration enforcement proponents off the airwaves -- in addition to pushing for Fairness Doctrine policies to shut up their foes. The New York Times reported that current "Race" president Janet Murguia believes "hate speech" should "not be tolerated, even if such censorship were a violation of First Amendment rights."

3. "The Race" sponsors militant ethnic nationalist charter schools subsidized by your public tax dollars (at least $8 million in federal education grants). The schools include Aztlan Academy in Tucson, Ariz., the Mexicayotl Academy in Nogales, Ariz., Academia Cesar Chavez Charter School in St. Paul, Minn., and La Academia Semillas del Pueblo in Los Angeles, whose principal inveighed: "We don't want to drink from a White water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of collecting rain in our aqueducts. We don't need a White water fountain ... ultimately the White way, the American way, the neo liberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction."

2. "The Race" has perfected the art of the PC shakedown at taxpayer expense, pushing relentlessly to lower home loan standards for Hispanic borrowers, reaping millions in federal "mortgage counseling" grants, seeking special multimillion-dollar earmarks and partnering with banks that do business with illegal aliens.

1. "The Race" thrives on ethnic supremacy -- and the elite sheeple's unwillingness to call it what it is. As historian Victor Davis Hanson observes: "[The] organization's very nomenclature 'The National Council of La Raza' is hate speech to the core. Despite all the contortions of the group, Raza (as its Latin cognate suggests) reflects the meaning of 'race' in Spanish, not 'the people' -- and that's precisely why we don't hear of something like 'The National Council of the People,' which would not confer the buzz notion of ethnic, racial and tribal chauvinism."

The fringe is the center. The center is the fringe. Viva La Raza.