The best advice for Senator McCain that we’ve read is the call in the adjacent columns, by Larry Kudlow, for the senator to lead a campaign in respect of the dollar. Mr. Kudlow, a supply-sider of the Reagan school, reckons Mr. McCain should campaign to reverse the declining fortunes of what he calls “the Bush wartime dollar” because, as Mr. Kudlow puts it, “America’s prestige is on the line.” He notes that today’s dollar is worth barely a thousandth of an ounce of gold. He warns that the falling dollar “is perceived as a sign of American decline,” and he comprehends that it’s “a very bad sign.”

It happens that the editors who conduct these columns have been covering the greenback — and how its fortunes are tied to our foreign policy and standing in the world — since at least the Carter years, when Secretary Blumenthal was running what our editor, then writing for the Wall Street Journal, called “the sinking dollar saloon.” And we’ve learned that dollar inflation has no upside and is deleterious in obvious and not-so-obvious ways. We’ve heard it likened to internal bleeding.

Mr. Kudlow calls inflation “the single biggest cause of recession” and “the cruelest tax.” Points out he: “Inflation robs consumer and wage-earner purchasing power. It erodes business profits. It reduces the real worth of investor portfolios.” And he points out that the capital gains tax is not indexed for inflation. “So,” Mr. Kudlow writes, “the effective tax rate on real capital gains has jumped to 37% from 22% since September. This inflation-tax penalty has emerged despite the fact that no new tax legislation has been passed in Washington. It also has occurred exactly while the stock market has fallen about 15%. Coincidence? I think not.”

By our lights this issue looks better for Mr. McCain than even Mr. Kudlow reckons. Mr. Kudlow figures Mr. McCain could use the dollar issue to distance himself from President Bush. We have no quarrel with criticizing Mr. Bush; we issued in December 2005 an editorial called “The Bush Dollar,” sketching the astonishing plunge in the greenback. But why should Mr. McCain run against Mr. Bush? Particularly when, in our heart-of-hearts, we don’t see the dollar as an executive branch responsibility, even though it is managed in part by the Treasury. Nor do we see it as a function entirely of the Federal Reserve, an agency that is supposedly independent.

Real responsibility for the dollar rests with the Congress. It is a constitutionalist’s view, to be sure, but there you have it. The only candidate who has been pressing the point is Ron Paul. The power to “coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin” is one of the enumerated powers that the Constitution, in Article I, Section 8, delegates specifically to the Congress. This is why, when the voters revoked the Republican mandate on the Hill, we issued, on November 30, 2006, an editorial called “The Pelosi.” At the time, the dollar under Republican management had fallen to about a 637th of an ounce of gold. It was, in our view, a crisis, but it wasn’t a rout, and we urged Mrs. Pelosi and her fellow Democrats to step up to their Article I, Section 8 responsibilities.

“If the dollar goes down further from here, it might as well be renamed the Pelosi,” we said, adding: “Going into a transitional election with a falling dollar is not something the Democrats will want to do.” In the event, the dollar has collapsed to little more than half its value when Mrs. Pelosi acceded to the leadership that has constitutional responsibility for the dollar, and one point that can be made to Mr. McCain is that he doesn’t need to run against Mr. Bush on this issue. He can run against the Democratic Congress and the illogic of the spending programs that make maintaining a strong currency so difficult.

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Not that the dollar itself needs to be, or should be, a political issue. It is the most ubiquitous symbol of American power and integrity, one that transcends the political parties and goes, as Mr. Kudlow so wisely points out, to our reputation as a nation. It has always struck us as no coincidence that the period of growth and American advance that occurred in the years of Reagan was also a period when the dollar was slowly but steadily gaining value, under, as it happens, the management of Paul Volcker, on whose watch it was brought up off the lows of less than an 800th of an ounce to which it had plunged during the long inflation of the 1970s. This is the period during which we won the Cold War and reached the height of our global credibility. It will be hard indeed for the Democrats to seize this plank given the other planks of spending and trade protection and taxes they are putting in place. Mr. McCain, however, is, as Mr. Kudlow suggests, perfectly placed to use this plank as a springboard between now and November.