The shrewdest question of at Tampa last night will, we predict, prove to be when Brian Williams turned to Congressman Ron Paul and asked him point blank: “Would you support a Newt Gingrich as nominee of the GOP?” The libertarian from Texas didn’t miss a beat, saying, “Well, he keeps hinting about attacking the Fed, and he talks about gold. Now if I could just change him on foreign policy, we might be able to talk business.” Then the matchmaker from NBC turned to the Georgian and asked: “Speaker Gingrich, are you willing to adjust to pick up an endorsement from Texas?”

“Well,” Mr. Gingrich started out, a bit coyly, “I got one on Friday from Governor Perry, which I liked a lot as a starting point. So I like endorsements from Texas. And Congressman Paul is right. There’s an area — I think what he has said about the Federal Reserve and what he has said about the importance of monetary policy, the proposal I’ve issued for a gold commission, which hearkens back to something that he and Jesse Helms helped develop, on which he served on in 1981, and the fact that we have people of the caliber of Lew Lehrman and Jim Grant, who have agreed they would chair such a commission — I think they’re areas we can work on.”

The former speaker then acknowledged that there are “places we disagree very deeply. Iran is a good example. But,” he continued, “there are places — you know, you build a coalition by trying to find ways you can work together, and frankly we could work together a lot more than either one of us could work with Barack Obama.” It’s not the first time Mr. Gingrich stretched out a hand to Ron Paul’s base. But it was the most pointed. He was asked about it pointedly and answered in the same spirit. And the point was not lost on either Dr. Paul or, we suspect, the significant number of Republicans who now vote for him.

The question is whether it is being lost to Governor Romney. On the face of it the danger that the Gingrich-Paul flirtation represents to the Romney campaign is something one would think would put the man from Massachusetts on red alert — or, to coin a phrase, gold alert. But he just stands there like a tree stump. Clearly the right move is for Mr. Romney to up the ante on the speaker and confront the hard money issue straight on. It is the issue of the hour, and one would think that Mr. Romney would have seichel to seize it.

Unless — and here is the nagging doubt about Mr. Romney — he doesn’t see it. The release of his tax returns confirms, if written confirmation were needed, that he has become enormously wealthy in the era of fiat money. A lot of people have. This newspaper doesn’t begrudge him or them a nickel of their winnings. But it’s not the kind of experience that makes them feel the crisis of the dollar personally. That pain belongs to the Florida commuter who’s paying more dollars for gasoline the value of which — when measured in ounces of silver or gold — has been dropping.

And that’s but one example of the impact of fiat money and the way it is crushing the spirit in the land. So far the candidate who really gets this down to the ground is Congressman Paul. The candidate who is shrewd enough to learn from him is Speaker Gingrich — at least so far. It would not surprise us if the winner of this long slog is the one who learns how to put this issue in the sharpest possible relief, in the terms that the millions of voters sense in their daily lives, and move from the realm of theory and government commissions into the business of crafting a mandate that the winner can take to Capitol Hill on the first day of his presidency.