Why isn’t the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee coming in for Jeffrey Bell in New Jersey? He’s in a remarkable political fight, running surprisingly close to the incumbent, Cory Booker, despite having zilch in his campaign account. Yet he can’t get his phone calls returned by the national GOP. This is all the more amazing because Mr. Bell is framing a national issue — the failure of the Federal Reserve to create jobs. It’s almost as if Bell’s real opponent were not the glad-handing Booker but Janet Yellen, the Fed chairman.

Mrs. Yellen has made reducing unemployment her No. 1 priority. The Fed has slathered trillions of dollars on the economy in an effort to boost jobs. The strategy’s failure — and the administration’s — is the best issue for the GOP in 2016. Mr. Bell understands the issue better than any candidate in the land right now. He grasps that the Fed deserves a big share of the blame for the Great Recession. He knows, too, that voters aren’t going to hear that from Cory Booker. He, after all, is a darling of Wall Street, which loves the Fed’s near-zero interest rates, which have buoyed the boom in share prices.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average last month briefly broke above 17,000. As far as job seekers are concerned, though, it might as well be the Mars Industrial Average.

The Fed got its mandate to try to boost jobs through the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins law. This added “full employment” to the Fed’s mission, on top of its duty to ensure stable prices. So the Fed feels authorized to fiddle with interest rates and to use other tools with an eye to boosting employment. The law, though, has been a strategic scandal. When President Jimmy Carter signed Humphrey-Hawkins, unemployment was 5.8 percent. The jobless rate promptly went the wrong way, crossing 10 percent in 1982.

Fed chief Paul Volcker had his priorities straight. He de facto ignored the goal of boosting short-term employment in favor of killing inflation. During Obama’s entire presidency, though inflation is at least ostensibly under control, the jobless rate hasn’t come down below even 6%, even though the Fed has thrown trillions of dollars into the fight to generate job, but the value of the dollar has collapsed (it’s now below a 1,200th of an ounce of gold). It turns out that debasing the dollar doesn’t generate jobs.

There was a time when even the liberal New York Times understood the folly of Humphrey Hawkins. It once called Humphrey-Hawkins an effort to “legislate wishful thinking” and a “cruel hoax” on the American worker. New Jersey’s jobless rate of 6.6% is above the national average, Mr. Bell reminded me this week. He said New Jersey graduates its sons and daughters from great colleges — and they immediately leave for Texas, Florida and even Pennsylvania. Mr. Bell argues that the real, deep solution to this is monetary reform.

What does that mean? Think about it this way: From 1947 until 1971, the unemployment rate in America averaged only 4.7%. Since 1971, unemployment has averaged 6.4%. If President Obama and the Democrats had been able to deliver jobs at pre-1971 rates, they’d be laughing. So what happened in 1971? That was the year America ended the Bretton Woods monetary system, under which foreign governments could redeem their dollar reserves in gold. The world monetary system fell apart, and we entered the age of fiat money. Prices soared, then came recession; businesses were flummoxed, unemployment rose, recession followed.

We pulled out of that under President Reagan, who cut taxes and regulation while Mr. Volcker battled inflation at the Fed. The boom lasted almost through George W. Bush’s presidency. Mr. Bell is the kind of politician who is in it for the principles. He wants to fix the system that broke in 1971. He sees a chance to make the next Congress and the next presidency transformative, in a way that will restore growth and offer jobs to the millions who’ve fallen out of the job market under Obama.

One would think that the National Republican Senatorial Committee would be champing at the bit to get into this race. Yet Mr. Bell can’t get its operatives to come on the line. He’s too much of a long-shot for a committee that, for all the complaining about all the money in politics, has but limited funds. It’s some situation — all the more so because even without big money, Mr. Bell has been surging against the glad-handing Mr. Booker, as the New York Post pointed out this week. He’s close enough that if he loses, a portion of the blame will attach to the national GOP. If he wins, he’ll frame the issues for 2016.

This column is adapted from the New York Post, where it appeared in the issue of August 7.