Well that was quick. Only a month ago the Sun issued its editorial “Romney Redux?,” expressing our hope that the 2012 Republican nominee would throw his hat in the ring for another presidential race. Now he’s announced that he’s considering doing just that. We have no illusions that the Sun played a causal (or even glancing) role, and we didn’t endorse him in advance of the primary. But we want to see a crowded field enter the contest for the Republican nod. The party has a deep, high quality bench. There’s no reason why Mr. Romney should be excluded just because he lost the last race.

It’s not that not Mr. Romney’s gubernatorial experience or his age or maturity that moves us to encourage him, though we particularly like his sunny, friendly optimism (it’s Reaganesque). The fact is that we were as disappointed in his 2012 campaign as was the Wall Street Journal, which wants him to accept his defeat so as to clear the deck for a new generation. We count the governor’s biggest mistake is failing to run on the monetary plank of the GOP platform, which called for the establishment of a new monetary commission to examine the establishing a monetary based on a metallic standard of value.

We’d hoped that Mr. Romney would see this as an opportunity to illuminate why the economic crisis of 2008 turned into the Great Recession. This was well marked in the 2012 primary, largely through the campaigning of Congressman Ron Paul and the former Speaker, Newt Gingrich. So the Republicans hammered such a plank into the platform. Mr. Romney seemed to grasp the point at times, breaking with his own aides who wanted him to support a another term for the chairman of the Federal Reserve governors, Ben Bernanke. Mr. Romney overruled them and said he would seek a new chairman.

Yet he went no further in engaging the monetary issue. Not even after he came under attack for his remark to donors in Florida that his job in the campaign was to focus on the 5% to 10% of voters who were in the center rather than the 47% who pay no income tax and who were likely to stick with President Obama no matter what. Yet high unemployment rates since 1971 compared to the previous generation, the high inequality rate about which Thos. Picketty complains, the soaring bankruptcy rate of which Senator Warren complains, all are features of the age of fiat money.

If Mr. Romney runs, the feature of his campaign that we’ll be watching for is how he responds on this issue. If he comprehends his error the last time, if he runs on this issue, he’ll have our attention. If he flubs it again, he won’t — and, more importantly, he’s unlikely to excite a primary campaign. No doubt there is a huge constituency out there for inflation, but that is a cause we would recommend leaving to the Democrats. Maybe they can do better with it than William Jennings Bryan did in 1896.

We don’t mind adding that we’re sorry, too, that Congressman Paul Ryan is not going to be seeking the presidency. He wants to stick with his chairmanship of Ways and Means. That’s a humdinger of a job, no doubt, but Mr. Ryan would have made a great candidate for president, even against his former running mate in a primary, and beyond. Just for the record, we want all the rest of them to run, too. Let the Republicans put up a primary that is a big tent and let the members of the party have a full range of choices for their nominee. That’s the winning formula.