For years I didn’t really get why Jeff Bell evoked intense admiration among people I respected, but it has become apparent to me in his Senate race against Cory Booker: Mr. Bell has a clearer grasp of our country’s predicament than any candidate for any Senate seat in the country.

This came out in the debate between Messrs. Bell and Booker that aired over the weekend in New Jersey. It made clear why Senator Booker has refused to go head-to-head with his opponent more than once. Another hour, and Mr. Booker would’ve been sunk.

Mr. Booker’s main sally against Mr. Bell is that he’s been living in Washington. It’s a bizarre issue. The whole race is about who is going to get the chance to go to Washington to deal with the problems Mr. Bell has already been dealing with there.

Mr. Bell’s record is astonishing. As a private citizen he has had more of an impact in Washington than Booker has had as a senator. The ideas he advanced, the ads he crafted put him at the epicenter of the Reagan revolution.

The first I heard of Mr. Bell was in 1980, when I returned from overseas and joined the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Two years after Mr. Bell had lost New Jersey’s Senate race to Bill Bradley, he was still ardently admired by the Journal’s editor, Robert Bartley. Another colleague, Jude Wanniski, had actually quit the editorial board to be able to campaign for Mr. Bell.

Back then, the big conceptual breakthrough was on taxes and the way inflation was pushing ordinary taxpayers into brackets meant for the wealthiest Americans. President Ronald Reagan attacked the tax rates, while Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker conquered the inflation. Today, Mr. Bell is the only candidate who has focused on the reason the correction of 2008 turned into the greatest recession since the 1930s: a system of fiat money that enables the Federal Reserve to pump into the economy dollars that have no backing.

The Fed has done this by the trillions. Yet who feels better for it? Only the bankers the Fed has bailed out, plus Wall Street, whose stock prices have been inflated by all these theoretical dollars that aren’t backed with anything real. Cory Booker wants to keep this merry-go-round spinning, though it’s merry only for the bankers, Wall Street and the government. No wonder CNBC reports that Booker has raised more Wall Street money in this election cycle than any other Senate candidate.

What a contrast to Mr. Bell. He speaks for the classical “forgotten man,” the middle-class person who pays his taxes and is never thought of. The tax-raisers like Mr. Booker’s Democrats just don’t pay him any mind, while they spend his or her money.

In the debate, Mr. Booker kept labeling Mr. Bell as a “Tea Party” person. “Tea” is an acronym for “taxed enough already.” Mr. Booker thinks no one is. (The Tax Foundation, incidentally, just ranked New Jersey dead last on its State Business Tax Climate Index.) Jeff Bell is the best of the Tea Party phenomenon. He’s got all its commitment to the Constitution and sound money while also endorsing — as he did in the debate under shrewd questioning by Mariela Salgado — a route to citizenship for certain undocumented immigrants.

Toward the debate’s end, Mr. Booker showed a shocking ignorance of Mr. Bell’s central issue: sound money. He called the gold standard a “19th-century idea that is debunked universally.” In fact, it was the law of the land under such modern presidents as FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK and LBJ. In fact it was abandoned only under Richard Nixon, and Congress is crackling with senators and representatives starting to take a new look at the damage done by fiat money. Mr. Booker is simply clueless about those discussions.

Could he get a shock on Nov. 4? On the one hand, the polls now suggest Mr. Booker will win by 20 points. He’s ahead 91% to 4% among Democrats. On the other hand, as William Kristol has pointed out, Mr. Bell is ahead by a similar margin among Republicans. And he has suddenly emerged ahead among independents.

So if Democrats, who no longer favor President Obama, stay home on Election Day, while change-hungry Republicans do turn out, Mr. Bell could conceivably win. He has already proved his ideas can win in the long run.

This column first appeared in the New York Post.