Too early to tip next Treasury chief: McCain adviser

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain would choose a Treasury Secretary with expertise and experience in financial markets, but now is too early to identify potential picks, an adviser said on Sunday.

"You have to do things in the right order and the first is to make our case to the American people and get John McCain elected," senior economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin told Reuters when asked about potential candidates for the post.

Interest in who might hold the top Treasury job in the next administration has grown as lawmakers work out a $700 billion bailout plan for financial institutions that would hand greater powers to the department.

Holtz-Eakin said that if elected McCain would choose someone with shared values.

"He's always felt that those sort of appointments require first and foremost ... shared values, the standards of ethics that he brings to this and the desire to operate in that fashion. And then clear expertise, experience and judgment," the adviser said.

"I would hope that, since this is a financial market policy, that any Secretary of the Treasury would have adequate experience to be involved in financial markets to begin with."

Asked whether the Wall Street crisis increased the likelihood of McCain prodding President George W. Bush's pick, Henry Paulson, to stay on board, Holtz-Eakin demurred.

"There's in general just nothing we can say about appointments. We have a campaign to run and hopefully he'll have a chance to get into the appointments business."

Public opinion polls show McCain has fallen around four to five percentage points behind Democrat Barack Obama just over a month before the November 4 election.

Observers have speculated that McCain, an Arizona senator, would consider Martin Feldstein, a Harvard economist and former president of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of computer giant Hewlett-Packard, and Phil Gramm, an economist and former senator from Texas, have also been mentioned as contenders.

Paulson, the former chairman and chief executive of investment bank Goldman Sachs, took over at Treasury in July 2006. He has been the administration's point-man on the unfolding financial crisis and the bailout.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama told CNBC last week Paulson would be involved in the transition if the Illinois senator won the election, but he did not say the Republican could keep his job.

In an interview with Reuters on September 15, Obama said he would choose someone "with extraordinary credentials who knows the marketplace, knows the players and knows government."

(additional reporting by Caren Bohan, editing by Alan Elsner)