One of the most remarkable campaign videos of the primary season has been on the air in Nevada in support of Senator Cruz. Headlined “Finish the Reagan Revolution,” it shows Ronald Reagan warning, as he was campaigning for president in 1980, of how the betrayal of the gold standard in the 1960s led to the inflation that was then destroying the American economy. He warned that we’d never regain price stability until we restored some form of gold backing to the dollar.

Then the video turns to Mr. Cruz’s now famous reply to Rick Santelli in the GOP debate in Colorado, where the Texan declared that the Federal Reserve should get out of the business of “trying to juice our economy and simply be focused on sound money and monetary stability, ideally tied to gold.” It led us to the conclusion that Mr. Cruz was the man most likely to advance the cause of monetary reform in the current campaign.

All the more so as we learn the backstory to the Reagan tape. We’re told by Jeff Bell, who was involved in making Reagan’s tape, that the footage was one of a handful of commercials Reagan had taped at a session in January 1980. After it was recorded, Reagan telephoned Mr. Bell and asked him to put the gold commercial off to one side. “But,” he ordered, “don’t erase it.” And so it has sat off to the side until this season.

That account illuminates a number of things. One is that Reagan understood money down to the ground. Another is that he was making his own strategic choices. He dealt with the great issue of the day by explaining bracket creep — that is, how inflation was driving working Americans into tax brackets that were intended only for the wealthy. This is how the great supply side revolution was won at the polls.

We’d like to think that the reason Reagan ordered that the tape not be destroyed is that he understood the issue was eventually going to emerge (could even he have imagined the value of a Federal Reserve note collapsing to a 1,200th of an ounce of gold?). What Mr. Cruz has recognized is that such a time is now. So he has seized on this issue like no other contender in the Republican race, though he’s only getting warmed up, we hope.

Mr. Cruz is all the more admirable because it won’t be easy to ride this issue to victory in this election. Reagan was running in an era of both stagnation (no growth) and inflation (which Keynesians liked to blame on an overheated economy). Now we are in a season of slow growth or outright stagnation but without the kind of inflation that registers in the consumer price index (art, Manhattan apartments, stock prices are another matter).

We’d like to think that Mr. Cruz’s strategy is the long ball. He knows that Congress has awakened to the failure of the Federal Reserve during the years of what has come to be called the Great Recession. He knows the House has passed the Federal Oversight Reform and Modernization Act, which would set up a structure for a strategic reform of American monetary policy. He knows the measure is right now before the Senate.

So Mr. Cruz knows that he is going to have something to say about this whether or not he wins the presidency. He knows, too, that Reagan was able to focus on the fiscal side because America had a particularly courageous chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, who led the conquest of inflation while Reagan pushed through the fiscal and regulatory reforms that ignited the Reagan boom.

Finally, Mr. Cruz knows that we haven’t seen that kind of heroism at the Fed in recent years. Which means it will be up to Congress, which holds the monetary powers, and the next president, who would have to sign any reform legislation. It is astounding that the other candidates are failing to step up on this issue, win, lose, or draw. We can’t imagine the Gipper would have asked that tape to be laid aside today.