“Are Bernanke and Co. losing faith?” asks a headline atop the front page of the Financial Times. It runs with a picture of the chairman of the Federal Reserve as he stares at a headline that says: “Central bank blues.” The scoop is by Robin Harding and Christopher Giles and runs inside the paper with yet another headline, which says: “As central bankers begin to doubt that their activist policies still have the power to boost demand, some economists are starting to call for radical new measures.”

The FT makes it clear enough that at least some of the leading central bankers are suffering from a drooping self-esteem. “I am a little — maybe more than a little bit — worried about the future of central banking,” it quotes the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, James Bullard, as saying.  “We’ve constantly felt that there would be light at the end of the tunnel and there’d be an opportunity to normalize but it’s not really happening so far.” What seems to be worrying Mr. Bullard turns out to be what he characterizes to the FT as “creeping politicization.”

What passes for radical new measures at the FT, however, is thin gruel. No mention of the kind of ferment that is going on in the Congress and in the Republican Party. The bill to audit the Fed, which is the premier expression at the moment of the political dissatisfaction at which Mr. Bullard bristles, is not mentioned in the FT. Nor is the fact that the Republican Party has just sent its candidate for president onto the hustings with a platform calling for a new gold commission. Nor any mention of the fact that the nominee, Governor Romney, has pointedly said that if he’s elected, he’ll seek a new chairman of the Fed.

No wonder the Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues are dejected. They have become prisoners of our system of fiat money. Mr. Bernanke is out publicly preaching — or at least teaching — against the idea of sound money, even while the political winds are starting to shift. Not only is he teaching his view, as he did in a series of lectures at George Washington University, but he’s moved to quarterly press conferences, a practice that was once unthinkable. He has cast himself athwart not only the congress but the Republican party to which he ostensibly belongs.

So where is the creeping politicization? Not in the Congress. Not in the presidency or its aspirants. They’re all supposed to be political. Politics is their job. And how could the politicians not take a look at the monetary system just right now? We are just starting to come up on the centenary of a Federal Reserve that was established on the express declarations on the floor of the Congress that the dollar would remain convertible into gold. It’ll be but a few years that we’ll mark the jubilee of the abandonment of that commitment. Given the failure of the fiat money system to produce the kind of turnaround everyone is seeking, why shouldn’t the central bank system be challenged?

Wouldn’t it be a wiser — and even happier — strategy for the central bankers themselves to welcome the political process that is now under way? Wouldn’t it be less stressful for them to stand aside and welcome the Congress and the politicians to do their democratic and constitutional duty? It can’t be easy for a central banker, in a time when the consumer price index suggests there is little inflation, to watch the notes, the dollars one is issuing plunge in value to less than a 1,700th of an ounce of gold, a value that is less than a sixth of what the notes were worth but a decade ago.