Economic conservatives—and, indeed, economics—have no place in the current GOP.

The predator state has no public purpose. Apart from a few empty slogans—smaller government, balance the budget, feel your pain—the connection between actual problems and actual policies has disappeared. It has become clear that, if the Republicans had their way, this election would not be about issues. It would be about anything else: personalities, associations, the politics of fear, and the life history of a long-ago prisoner of war.

But fate blew McCain's cover. On the morning that Lehman Bros. and Merrill Lynch fell, John McCain spoke the immortal words of Herbert Hoover: "The fundamentals of our economy are strong." He said it twice. It's a phrase with deep resonance in American politics. People understand it. No politician says "the fundamentals are strong" unless they know that they are not.

The Dow Jones average fell 504 points that day. As stocks crashed, suddenly people remembered that modern markets cannot exist without a cop on the beat. Every important market out there, from fresh food and safe drugs to autos and air travel to housing and health care, depends on government to maintain trust, and without it, none of them would survive. Without regulation, predators take over, and when they do, trust eventually collapses. Every important market is in peril now, precisely because of the predators in power these past eight years. And none more immediately than finance.

The Bush-Paulson bailout exposed the predator state in detail. Deregulation and desupervision were the origin of this crisis: the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealing Glass-Steagall, and the Gramm-authored loophole legitimating credit default swaps in 2000. Bush's financial regulators brought chainsaws to press conferences, a clear signal to sub-prime hustlers that "anything goes." "Liar's loans," "neutron loans" and "toxic waste" became financial terms of art. When the crash came, Paulson and Bernanke were plainly not up to the job. The original three-page Treasury bill was less a power grab than a punt; it said to Congress: "there's nobody home over here."

The crisis forces McCain back to issues and exposed the emptiness of his campaign. He resorted to theatrics, "suspending" his campaign to fly to Washington to "work" on a bailout bill, only to demonstrate that his leadership charms were lost on Republican members of the House. At the White House summit he had nothing to say. Later he attacked the morals and ethics of Wall Street, but backed a bill that was aimed to protect the stock prices of the Wall Street firms, while imposing no new discipline and doing nothing to stop the foreclosures. And when it came time to actually cast his vote, he couldn't be bothered even to speak from the Senate floor.

It seems unlikely that John McCain, the regulation-wrecker, will become, overnight, the man who would turn vice to virtue on Wall Street. But even suppose he were serious. Who would trust him? No one with money on the line.