Way back in March, we examined the intemperate remarks of some of the campaign staffers in the then-raging race for the Democratic presidential nomination and wondered if the two leading candidates at the time, Sens. Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton, might have felt some spiritual connection to the late, great Casey Stengel, who summed up the whole season of his hapless 1962 New York Mets by plaintively asking, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

The principal stooges back then were Clinton spokes­man Howard Wolfson, who ludicrously compared Obama to Kenneth Starr, and Obama adviser Samantha Power, who called Clinton “a monster” during an interview with an Irish journalist and then tried unsuccessfully to take it back. Supporting players were Clinton campaign treasurer Geraldine Ferraro, who said Obama would never have come as far as he had if he were white, and Obama confidant Jeremiah Wright, who said — Lord, what didn’t he say?

Their bosses gently unloaded all of those miscreants, with the exception of Wolfson, who is apparently too ornery to fire.

Today, as part of our ongoing effort to keep our faithful readers abreast of the latest political surrogate to slip on a rhetorical banana peel, we present Texas’ own Phil Gramm, a former U.S. senator and co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign.

Gramm, an economist by training and an intemperate blowhard by inclination, was deposing on the economy in an interview with the Washington Times when he said that contrary to Democratic Party doomsayers, the United States was not in a recession.

“You’ve heard of mental depression,” Gramm opined to the Times; “this is a mental recession.”

So far, so good, at least technically. There are several textbook definitions of an economic recession, all of them vague, and our current situation doesn’t quite fit any of them — yet.

But Gramm didn’t know when to shut up. He then added, “We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining.”

That is the kind of comment nobody wants to hear when the housing market is down the tubes, healthcare costs are soaring, gasoline is headed to $5 a gallon and American jobs are being outsourced to India in large crates, the crates themselves having been made in China.

They especially don’t want to hear it said by a rich guy who set his own salary while in office and provided himself with a medical insurance plan that is out of the financial reach of any American who isn’t the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

Gramm at first tried to defend himself by saying that he was referring to congressional Democrats as whiners, not the American people, but anybody, even his supporters, who read the Times quotes carefully had a difficult time accepting that tortured interpretation.

John McCain certainly did. He wasted no time is disassociating himself from Gramm’s callous remarks, and even joked that there might be a spot for the garrulous Texan in the McCain administration: the ambassadorship to Belarus.

By the end of the week Gramm had at last read the handwriting on the wall, or at least had it read to him, along with the Riot Act, and he stepped down as the co-chairman of the McCain campaign. He made his exit with the same sort of self-important sputtering that accompanied the departure of his Democratic counterparts earlier this year, saying that he was leaving the campaign in order to remove any “distractions” from the ongoing debate.

He never mentioned that the main “distraction” was that of having an insensitive clod at the helm of a presidential campaign, though we’d bet someone, maybe even John McCain himself, pointed it out to him before handing him his walking papers.

Policy is decided along strict party lines, but arrogance and stupidity are nonpartisan.