AP

JOHN MCCAIN'S economic instincts may be sound—he is, after all, the only solid free-trader in the race, and a genuine hater of government waste—but on present form he is not turning out to be much of a salesman. In two recent speeches, he has laid out his economic vision. He addressed America's biggest short-term economic problem (the credit crunch) and its most important one—the looming bankruptcy of Social Security (public pensions) and Medicare (public health care for the old). For the former, he proposed a more cautious fix than his Democratic rivals. On the latter, he hinted at fundamental reform. But in neither case has he offered nearly enough detail.

For “deserving” homeowners caught out by the credit crunch, Mr McCain offers a lifeline. If you took out a subprime mortgage after 2005 to buy a house to live in, and can show that you were creditworthy when you took out the loan but unable to service it now because it reset to a higher rate, he would let you switch to a cheaper loan guaranteed by the government. His advisers say this would help between 200,000 and 400,000 borrowers. Democrats scoff that they would help far more people. Mr McCain says that he, unlike them, will not use taxpayers' money to bail out rash borrowers and speculators.

Commendably, Mr McCain has also stressed the need to fix Medicare and Social Security. Unless fixed, these programmes will bust the budget as the baby-boomers retire in ever-growing numbers. Congress consistently ducks the issue. Mr McCain pledges to work with both parties to fix it. But how? He does not say, other than by squeezing costs.

The president who fixes Medicare would have to be a deficit hawk who can work with the other side. Mr McCain has a better record than Mrs Clinton on both counts, and a much better one than Mr Obama, whose bipartisan achievements are negligible. But both Democrats palpably know more about the subject, and can easily out-debate him.

Mr McCain's approach to economics is moralistic. He thinks it wrong for Congress to waste other people's money, and wrong for chief executives to trouser huge pay packets when they mismanage. He has a tendency, though, to focus on the wrongs that are simplest to understand. Mrs Clinton's proposal to spend $1m of taxpayers' cash on a Woodstock museum was indeed egregious, but even scrapping all such pork-barrel projects, as Mr McCain promises, will have only a modest effect on the budget—since “earmarks” total only about $18 billion, 0.5% of the budget.

Mr McCain knows this, and promises some quite drastic changes. He would freeze discretionary spending for a year (exempting only funds for the military and veterans) and conduct a “top to bottom review” of the budget. He would end the “assumption that [government programmes] should go on for ever”. He would give taxpayers the option of switching to a simpler, flatter tax code. He would make private health insurance portable, so workers can keep it when they change jobs. But even so, none of this adds up to the savings he would require.

He is asking voters to trust him. He has been a fiscally conservative senator, so he will be a fiscally conservative president. Never mind that, as a candidate, he offers few examples of programmes he would axe. He says he would lower the corporate tax from 35% to 25% and keep the Bush tax cuts, which he once opposed. He says he can do this while still closing the budget deficit within eight years. But because he has so far been afraid to list the deductions he will axe and the loopholes he will close, his plans amount, at best, to half a fiscal policy, and the easy half at that.

In selling himself as the best man to lead America out of recession, Mr McCain faces two huge challenges. He is less adept than his opponents at oozing empathy. And the recession itself will hobble him, because he is a Republican. Ray Fair, a Yale economist, predicts election results using a measure of inflation and growth in average incomes. If incomes are flat this year (probably an optimistic assumption), his model predicts that Mr McCain will be flattened in November.