Over the past two weeks, John McCain has learned the hard way that economics is called the "dismal science" for good reason. Plummeting in the polls as the meltdown of the global financial system exposes voters to his admitted ignorance of the economy, McCain is also being rejected by economists as well. As it turns out, economists don't think too highly of John McCain, including many who support him.

McCain's recent woes among the profession were fittingly revealed last week in the pages of The Economist. Its email survey answered by 142 members of the National Bureau of Economic Research found that "the majority - at times by overwhelming margins - believe Mr. Obama has the superior economic plan, a firmer grasp of economics and will appoint better economic advisers." While respondents were overrepresented by those identifying themselves as Democrats, the magazine concluded, "Still, even if we exclude respondents with a party identification, Mr. Obama retains a strong edge."

Matters only got worse for John McCain last Monday, when the New York Times detailed the chilly reception from reliably Republican business groups to McCain's potentially devastating plan for health care:

The officials, with organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Federation of Independent Business, predicted in recent interviews that the McCain plan, which eliminates the exclusion of health benefits from income taxes, would accelerate the erosion of employer-sponsored health insurance and do little to reduce the number of uninsured from 45 million...

..."To some in the business community, this is very discomforting," said R. Bruce Josten, executive vice president for government affairs at the Chamber of Commerce. 'The private marketplace, in my opinion, is ill prepared today with an infrastructure for an individual-based health insurance system."

Which may explain why the McCain campaign on Friday issued a list of "100 distinguished and experienced economists" who signed a statement attacking Barack Obama's economic proposals as "wrong for the American economy." But as ThinkProgress noted, John McCain not only got his math wrong, he padded his list with supporters:

Only 90 names appear on the list, not 100. What's more, a full 11 of those economists are McCain economic advisers. The list of "100" even includes Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain's chief economic adviser and one of his most visible spokesmen.

Sadly for McCain, many of these same economists scoffed at his knee-jerk plan to purchase distressed home mortgages at face value. As Huffington Post summarized, their reactions included expressions such "bewilderment", "political gamesmanship", "ill-considered" and even "ridiculous."

This isn't the first time McCain's roll-out of a list of economists backing his candidacy has come to grief. In July, his campaign announced that 300 economists had "enthusiastically endorsed" his so-called "Jobs for America" plan. But as Politico noted at the time, that too was a fraud:

There's just one problem. Upon closer inspection, it seems a good many of those economists don't actually support the whole of McCain's economic agenda. And at least one doesn't even support McCain for president.

McCain's unhappy experience with the economics profession isn't just a matter of policy differences. After all, McCain was only too happy to engage in economist-bashing when it suited his purposes. Back in June, McCain ridiculed economists for their overwhelming dismissal of the proposed gas-tax holiday scheme he had recycled from Bob Dole:

"You know the economists?'' McCain said June 12 at Federal Hall, near the New York Stock Exchange. "They're the same ones that didn't predict this housing crisis we're in. They're the same ones that didn't predict the dot-com meltdown. They're the same ones that didn't predict the inflation that's staring us in the face today."

And so it goes for John McCain. In December 2007, he acknowledged, "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should." In his reply to The Economist survey earlier this month, James Harrigan of the University of Virginia responded, "I take McCain's word on this one."

UPDATE: A glaring omission from the list above is the decline and fall of John McCain's much-derided vision of the "eBay economy." In Tuesday's debate, McCain again touted eBay as the future of the American economy and cited its former CEO Meg Whitman as his possible choice for Treasury Secretary. Sadly, that came just one day after eBay announced it was slashing 10% of its 16,000 person workforce.