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.

I don’t want a president who feels my pain. I want a president who understands economics sufficiently not to cause pain with ignorant, but politically expedient, policies.

So three cheers to Phil Gramm. The WSJ profiled him recently.

“They didn’t live up to what they promised to do. Power corrupted them. They spent lots of money and tried to buy votes. Republicans concluded that they could make voters love them by governing the way Democrats did.”

So says former Texas senator and current John McCain economics adviser Phil Gramm.

When he rode off into the political sunset in 2002 for a high-rolling investment banking job at UBS, there was joy among many of his liberal colleagues on Capitol Hill. For two decades the man who came to be called “Dr. No” had earned a reputation as a one-man wrecking crew of big-government legislative priorities. “I consider defeating Hillary health care as one of my greatest accomplishments,” he says.

A look at the record confirms that Mr. Gramm played a decisive role in nearly every fiscal conservative victory in the 1980s and ’90s – from the Reagan budget and tax cuts to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley banking reforms of the late 1990s.

Mr. Gramm tells me he’s been “intentionally invisible” since leaving Washington “so that he could devote his full energies” to the art of the deal on Wall Street. This is his first lengthy interview on politics in years.

I chased him down in New York. The man is always crisscrossing the globe these days. Mr. Gramm is now 65 years old, but remarkably unchanged in appearance from the first time I met him 25 years ago. He is still long and slim and slightly-hunched over, with the same professorial glasses. And of course, there is still the Texas drawl.

He is most eager to talk about his transition to Wall Street. Mr. Gramm has been a key instigator of some of the biggest money-making UBS deals of recent years, including most recently the Visa IPO, the most profitable public offering ever. Just as in the Senate, he says, to succeed, “you have to do a tremendous amount of homework and always be more prepared than the other guy.”

Most of his former colleagues probably can’t fathom why Wall Street bankers make tens of millions of dollars in salaries and bonuses each year. How would he justify these fat pay days? “It’s simple,” he lectures, sounding very much like the Texas A&M economics professor that he was in the 1970s: “In economics, we define labor exploitation as paying people less than their marginal value product. I recently told Ed Whitacre [former CEO of AT&T, who retired with a $158 million pay package] he was probably the most exploited worker in American history because he took Southwestern Bell, which was the smallest of the former Bell companies, and he turned it into the dominant phone company on earth. His severance package should have been billions.”

Mr. Gramm says that today there is “a lucrative premium for talent. When we were all hunters and gatherers, and you were better with a bow and arrow than I was, there were limits on how much more game you could kill than me. Today, CEO decisions about whether to acquire or not acquire a company, to shut down one part of the company or not shut it down, get into a market, get out of a market, where those decisions mean billions of dollars, is it surprising that people are willing to pay tremendous amounts of money for people who make those decisions right?”

So what if a President Barack Obama were to impose 50% or 60% tax rates on these CEOs and other big earners? Mr. Gramm pounces: “When you help a company raise capital, to put its idea to work, and you create jobs, those jobs are the best housing program, education program, nutrition program, health program ever created. Look, if a man in one lifetime is responsible for creating 100 real jobs, permanent jobs, then he’s done more than most do-gooders have ever achieved.”