So it turns out that the last segment of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” airing tonight, finds the former governor and her family out panning for gold. Mrs. Palin issued a brief advance about the segment on her Facebook page, where she noted that the gold price, at the time of the posting, was $1,368.90 an ounce — or, as we like to put it, the value of a dollar is at a near record low of less than a 1,368^th of an ounce of gold. Panning for gold, it develops, is an annual expedition for the Palin family, and it occurrs to us that this tactile sensitivity to gold and its price is part of Mrs. Palin’s canniness about the economy.

No wonder she was the first politician to express alarm over the collapsing value of the dollar in terms of gold. No wonder that she was the first politician to spring into print in respect of the second round of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, with the journalists and intelligentsia scrambling behind her. She makes a point of connecting every year with the scarcity of gold, the difficulty of bringing it out of the ground in amounts that could rock the world’s money supply, its rare feature as an inert element, and the way it is bound up in the history of her state and country as a store of value.

In some ways it reminds us of one of our favorite stories about President Reagan, which we’ve told in these columns before and relates to a politician who was underestimated in respect of his comprehension of the real economy. It was told to us by one of his ambassadors to France, Van Gailbraith, who at one point drew the assignment to go in to see Reagan and brief him on the big issue that was going to be on the table when Reagan would meet with his French counterpart, Francois Mitterrand. The issue was corn gluten, which played a huge role in the economy of France and in trade tensions between the two countries.

Ambassador Galbraith went into the Oval Office to brief the president, and began by saying something to this effect: “Mr. President, to prepare you for your meeting with President Mitterrand I’m going to have to explain to you about corn gluten . . .” Before he could get any further, Reagan laughed and told the ambassador that he didn’t need an education on corn gluten or its importance. He was from Illinois. Then he leaned forward, opened the bottom drawer of his desk, and said,”I keep a jar of corn gluten right here in my desk — I use it to feed the squirrels.”

We wouldn’t want to make too much of that story, but we wouldn’t want to make too little of it either. Reagan had a far more tactile feel of the real economy than his critics gave him credit for. And one gets that impression about Mrs. Palin, with her involvement in oil, with her “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” episode on fishing (“it smell’s like fish money,” she tells to her daughter as halibut are unloaded at a cannery), and now with her episode on panning for gold. We are in a period in which the connection between the dollar and something real seems ever more tenuous. It’s nice to see a politician who understands the connection and the meaning of gold.