Senator McCain was in Lower Manhattan last night for a “Town Hall Meeting,” and let’s just say, if Mr. McCain turns in this bad a performance before a handpicked crowd of loyal supporters, without any hostile questioning from the press or Senator Obama, it is going to be a long and painful campaign. What becomes clear after a few seconds of watching Mr. McCain is he has an inadequate grasp of free-market economics.

Last night, he pronounced himself “very angry, frankly, at the oil companies,” because of their “obscene profits.” In fact as a percentage of revenues, oil company profits have been pedestrian — about 8.1 cents on every dollar of revenues over the past five years, according to the American Petroleum Institute. If Mr. McCain thinks an 8.1% profit margin is “obscene,” what would befall the American economy if he becomes president? Politicians should be in favor of American companies making big profits; they end up in the pockets of shareholders, which, just for the record, increasingly in recent decades have included the pension funds of the employees of private companies and public institutions.

It is hard to imagine a worse thing for America’s economy than for corporate executives to be running around figuring out how their companies can make less money so that President McCain doesn’t get angry at them. What level of profit does Mr. McCain think would be non-obscene, and what would it mean for the American economy if companies all set out to make less money to reach that level?

RELATED: McCain on Wall Street: ‘Angry’ About Oil.

That was just the start of it. Mr. McCain spoke in favor of how President Reagan and Speaker O’Neill worked together to save Social Security. He offered to do the same thing by sitting down with Speaker Pelosi. That would be a big mistake: the 1983 deal increased the payroll tax to 15.3% from 12.3%, a tax staggering increase of nearly 25%. That’s why Senator Obama, when asked about Social Security during the primary campaign, answered, “I think we should approach it the same way Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan did back in 1983. They came together.” How is Mr. McCain going to win the election if he can’t even draw a basic distinction against Mr. Obama on Social Security reform? Mr. McCain made no mention of private accounts or an ownership society, he just invoked the ghost of Tip O’Neill, as if he was running not for president but for a congressional seat representing North Cambridge, Mass.

On the corporate tax, where Mr. McCain attempted to make a case for rate-cutting, the candidate didn’t even have his facts right. He claimed Japan has a higher corporate tax rate than America. That’s wrong; the federal rate in Japan is 30%, compared to America’s 35%, according to the Tax Foundation. He claimed the corporate tax rate in Ireland is 11%. That’s wrong, too; it’s 12.5%, according to the Tax Foundation.

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Now we don’t want to be too harsh on Mr. McCain. He is a war hero, and he means well. And the odds are that by the time he and Mr. Obama get finished hammering together their respective platforms, Mr. McCain’s is going to be the platform most attractive to those who believe in free minds and free markets. Mr. Obama is the tribune of the party that wants to raise your taxes and restrict your trade. But on the evidence of Mr. McCain’s visit to the capital of American capitalism, he has a lot of tuning up to do if he is to campaign as a spokesman for pro-growth polices. He badly needs someone like Steve Forbes in his brain trust (or on his ticket). We are at a moment when American-style capitalism could use some articulate defenders.