Governor Romney is moving lickety-split to distance himself from the hint by one of his advisers that he just might, given the chance, consider reappointing Governor Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve. A surge of speculation on the point erupted after interview the dean of Columbia Business School, Glenn Hubbard, who advises Mr. Romney, gave an interview to Reuters in which he said that the Fed chairman “gets paid nothing for getting kicked around all the time” and is “a model technocrat.” Said Mr. Romney’s adviser: “I think they ought to pat him on the back,” adding that he should “get every consideration” for another term.

One can discount Mr. Hubbard’s remarks, which we first read about on the futureofcapitalism.com Web log, for the fact that Messrs. Bernanke and Hubbard are friends. Reuters quotes Mr. Hubbard as saying that he speaks regularly to Mr. Bernanke and that they have known one another “since they were ‘practically kids.’” Says Mr. Hubbard: “I may or may not agree with him, but that’s very different from saying I question his motives. I wish politicians would stop doing that,” Hubbard told Reuters TV. It’s a point with which we happen to agree. But no one we know is questioning Mr. Bernanke’s motives or integrity.

No, this is a debate over monetary policy and how best to conduct it. And how — not to put too fine a point on it — the Constitution requires it to be conducted. It is the Constitution, after all, that all federal, state, and local officials, including Mr. Bernanke, are sworn to support. This is what Congressman Ron Paul has made the centerpiece of his long “Campaign for Liberty.” It is one of the reasons why his followers are fighting so hard for their delegate seats at Tampa, so that they can make sure the Republican platform lays down clear lines.

They are, after all, deciding whether to stick with the Republican line in November or, presumably, swing behind, say, the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, or even vote for Dr. Paul in protest. So this is not something about which Mr. Romney wants to keep people guessing. He fumbled the issue early in his campaign. In April 2011, in an interview with Lawrence Kudlow, he said he wasn’t going to second-guess Mr. Bernanke on monetary policy. As the Republican primary battle wore on, however, he appeared to see the issue more clearly and finally declared that he would not reappaoint Mr. Bernanke.

So it would have been a serious matter were Mr. Romney to start backsliding now. He was smart to jump right in on the news cycle and make his intentions clear. The Dow Jones ticker quoted him this afternoon as saying that the chairman of the Federal Reserve “should be a new person . . . someone who shares my economic views.” Dow Jones quoted Mr. Romney as saying he would ensure the Fed is focused on “maintaining the stability of a strong dollar and confident that America will not go down the road that other nations have gone down to their peril.”

If we were Mr. Romney — a stretch, to be sure — the person we’d turn to on this topic is his running mate, Congressman Ryan. He is, as we have several times pointed out in these columns, one of the few politicians to look Mr. Bernanke in the eye and ask him what he makes of the collapse in the value of the dollar that has been signaled by the price of gold. Mr. Ryan, in a shrewdly crafted question at a hearing of the Budget Committee that Mr. Ryan chairs in the House, elicited from Mr. Bernanke a confession that he was mystified.

“I don’t fully understand the movements in the gold price,” said the chairman of the world’s most important central bank. He did go on to admit that he reckoned there was “a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety in financial markets right now” and to speculate that “some people believe that holding gold will be a hedge against the fact that they view many other investments as being risky and hard to predict at this point.” As we noted noted, it’s not “other investments” that worry people. It’s the Federal Reserve Notes that Mr. Bernanke issues that worry them.

The value of those notes has been falling again of late to below, when we last checked, a 1,665th of an ounce of gold. We are not an intimate of Mr. Ryan, but our impression is that he gets this issue clearer than most of the leading figures in the Congress. We think he understands the principle we marked in these columns when Mr. Bernanke was first elevated to chairman: “America favors the rule of law over the rule of individual men.” The dollar and where and how it is defined are questions on which the party needs to send a clear signal from Tampa. In our view, it is the biggest issue of political economy in the whole campaign, bigger even than the fiscal and tax issues. Mr. Romney’s confirmation today that he would not reappoint Mr. Bernanke is a step in the right direction. The real questions, though, are whom he would appoint and whether he would lead the country forward to sound money.