There are some lists that you just don't want to be on. The No-Fly List. The 10 Most Wanted List. The list of candidates so desperate they actually want George Bush to come out and campaign with them.

Then there's John McCain's List of Real Smart People. What does it take to be on this list? Well, Sarah Palin is there.

McCAIN: She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America.

Who else makes the list? Try former Texas Senator, Phil Gramm.

McCAIN: one of the smartest people in the world on economics

As we watch the financial sector move into the next stage of melt down, here's a reminder of what Gramm did to earn himself a spot as not only a Real Smart Person, but McCain's top economic advisor.

[Gramm]was co-sponsor of the 1999 law that allowed commercial banks to get into investment banking. And the fact that Gramm was a prime architect of a 2000 bill that kept regulators' hands off of "credit default swaps," an exotic financial tool which helped enable the bundling and selling of crappy subprime mortgages to investors.

In other words, Gramm was at the top of the list of people rushing to give the banking industry "more flexibility" and relieve them of all those nasty regulations that kept them from showing the kind of constraint that Wall Street always shows when nobody is looking.

The value of the entire U.S. Treasuries market: $4.5 trillion. The value of the entire mortgage market: $7 trillion. The size of the U.S. stock market: $22 trillion. The size of the credit default swap market last year: $45 trillion. [Risk expert] CHRISTOPHER WHALEN: They are the most hideous kind of speculation. To have a federally insured bank like JPMorgan as the largest dealer in this market, to me says we don't know what we're doing anymore, and we don't understand the difference between real work -- real economic activity -- and something that's essentially wasting.

Phil Gramm saw to it that banks could not only become involved in risky investments, they could buy and sell those investments to each other, creating a speculative shadow economy many times larger than the real economy, and Gramm made sure that all this activity was completely unregulated.

Back to Dave Davies' of the Philadelphia Daily News and his July interview with McCain.

[McCain] said that Gramm and others thought that they were doing the right thing in the 2000 legislation. But that's just the point. Nobody thought that they were setting up a cataclysmic collapse in the nation's financial sector, but when you're restricting public oversight of private markets, you'd better give some serious thought to the downside.

Serious thought to the downside? That's surrender talk. Hell, boy, what kind of maverick are you?

That kind of thinking is never going to make McCain's list. Which is a very important reason why McCain shouldn't be on anyone's list of potential presidents.