Phil Gramm is right. We are a nation of whiners.

The former Texas senator had been co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign. Then he gave an interview in which he disputed that the country is in a recession. The country, he told the Washington Times, has become a “nation of whiners.”

Gramm was right about the facts. A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. This we have not had, even though growth has slowed. As for the whining, it’s a matter of opinion. But on that score as well, a point can be made that the Texan was correct.

In Southern California, for example, the same copy of the Orange County Register that reported Gramm’s departure from the campaign had this fat headline at the top of the front page: “It’s very, very bad.”

What was so very bad? The unemployment rate in Orange County had jumped four-tenths of a point in June, to 5.2 percent. The “very bad” headline was drawn from a remark by an economist at Chapman University, and the story noted that the jobless rate had not been that high since the summer of 2003.

In Oregon’s Linn County, the jobless rate has not been as low as 5.2 percent for quite some time, and nobody says that conditions are “very bad.”

The paper in Orange County also reported, but much lower in the story, that the county’s jobless rate was still among the lowest in California, and that hiring was picking up in some job skills, especially electronic assembly.

“If you can solder, you’ve got a job,” the paper quoted the manager of a manpower agency. But that, of course, was not in the headline on page one but near the tail end of the story on page 19.

And all this was reported at the end of a week in which the stock market staged a remarkable rally and oil prices fell sharply, no doubt partly as a result of reduced consumption in the United States brought on by the high price of gas.

There is no question that the price of gas is causing a hardship, and that segments of the economy are having a rough time. But if Gramm had seen how one of the leading regional papers in the country treated this change in the labor situation, he might well have said exactly the thing that he said in the Washington Times. (hh)