Senator McCain, in a speech at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, offered yesterday a preview of his economic message for the general election campaign, and our review is decidedly mixed. On the upside, Mr. McCain proposed that the federal government suspend all taxes on gasoline this summer. The federal gas tax has been a target of these columns for years. In an April 28, 2006, editorial, “Gas on the Hill,” we praised as a “good idea” a proposal to suspend for two months the 18.4 cents a gallon federal excise on gasoline. We followed up with a May 23, 2007, editorial, “Gas and the Democrats,” in which we wrote, “If the Democrats were really concerned about high gasoline taxes for consumers, they could today roll back the 30% gas-tax increase they imposed in the first year of the Clinton-Gore administration.”

We followed up again with a June 25, 2007, editorial, “Gas Gouging,” that said, “if the Democrats are so concerned about the high price of gasoline, they could start by repealing the federal gas tax, which is 18.4 cents a gallon.” To see Mr. McCain take up this line of reasoning is just terrific, and our only regret is the senator’s plan to bring the gas tax back in time for Labor Day. Why not just scrap it altogether? Also in the “good idea” category are Mr. McCain’s proposals to increase the federal tax exemption for dependents to $7,000 from $3,500, to cut the corporate tax rate to 25% from 35%, and to get rid of the Alternative Minimum Tax.

More troubling was Mr. McCain’s decision to single out for vilification two businessmen. “Americans are also right to be offended when the extravagant salaries and severance deals of CEO’s — in some cases, the very same CEO’s who helped to bring on these market troubles — bear no relation to the success of the company or the wishes of shareholders,” Mr. McCain said in his remarks prepared for delivery at Carnegie Mellon. “Something is seriously wrong when the American people are left to bear the consequences of reckless corporate conduct, while Mr. Cayne of Bear Stearns, Mr. Mozilo of Countrywide, and others are packed off with another forty- or fifty million for the road.”

Mr. Cayne, a former bridge columnist of this newspaper, lost about $1 billion in the collapse of Bear Stearns, where he worked for nearly 40 years, 15 of them as chief executive, during a period in which the firm created great value for its shareholders, employees, and customers and placed a priority on philanthropy. There has been no evidence of any intentional wrongdoing on his part. To single this 74-year-old out for opprobrium to score political points in the middle of a presidential campaign is just inappropriate — like Attorney General Spitzer taking shots at Maurice Greenberg or John Whitehead. What would Mr. McCain like to see done to Mr. Cayne: have the last 6% of his wealth, accumulated in a long career according to board and shareholder approved contracts, punitively confiscated by the government? It’s the wrong message for a politician who vowed, as Mr. McCain did elsewhere in his speech, to “use the power of free markets to grow our economy.”

Some of the same reasoning applies to Mr. Mozilo. The Bronx-born son of a butcher founded Countrywide in 1969 and built it, over nearly 40 years, from nothing into a Fortune 500 company that employed 35,000 people and helped millions of Americans achieve homeownership. Countrywide’s story ended badly, and Mr. Mozilo has lost tens of millions of dollars as a result. But why should Mr. McCain, rather than the Countywide board, be deciding Mr. Mozilo’s compensation?

The irony of all this is that if there is any place where a politician should know better than to use an economic downturn to vilify personally an individual who has been a successful businessman, it is a university named in part after Andrew Mellon, himself a successful businessman who was targeted by the Democrats during an economic downturn, the Great Depression. Say what one will about Messrs. Cayne and Mozilo, they are self-made men who took risks and devoted their entire careers to building companies — unlike, say, Mr. McCain, who came by his own substantial wealth by marrying into it. If Mr. McCain thinks these sorts of populist pot shots are going to inspire risk-taking in the capitalist economy, he knows even less economics than he lets on. Better to stick to the tax cuts and leave picking on individual capitalists to the Democrats.