OCTOBER 30, 2015 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

[Allahpundit is an anonymous blogger and the senior editor for the conservative commentary website, Hot Air]

The time has come for Jeb Bush to reconsider his future. He clearly does not enjoy being on the campaign trail. He is not a man for this season. He has not held elected office since January 2007, and it is showing. Worse, he is having to make the case that a third Bush is the best person to pit against the second Clinton — while on the stage with new, young faces of a Republican Party that has moved beyond the Bush legacy.

Jeb Bush should have run in 2012, but he would have even then been anchored by his last name. It is relatively unfair that Bush is anchored by his last name, but it is true. It is also true that he was once very successful politician, but that was a decade ago. Bush stands on a presidential debate stage, and we can almost hear him wondering what happened and how everything passed him by.

If Jeb Bush is not willing to fire a lot of people and retool his campaign, he needs to settle on being a former presidential candidate. Those of us who like him, whether or not he is our choice for president, hate to see a good man descending to farce and a kind man descending to has-been status.

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It’s widely believed among high Jeb supporters that Mr. Trump—“The Gong Show,” as they call him—has kept Mr. Bush from rising. But Mr. Trump isn’t the problem, he was the revealer of the problem: Jeb just isn’t very good at this.

He’s not good at the merry aggression of national politics. He never had an obvious broad base within the party. He seemed to understand the challenge of his name in the abstract but not have a plan to deal with it. It was said of Scott Walker that the great question was whether he had the heft and ability to go national. The same should have been asked of Jeb. He had never been a national candidate, only a governor. Reporters thought he was national because he was part of a national family.

He was playing from an old playbook—he means to show people his heart, hopes to run joyously. But it’s 2015, we’re in crisis; they don’t care about your heart and joy, they care about your brains, guts and toughness. The expectations he faced were unrealistically high. He was painted as the front-runner. Reporters thought with his record, and a brother and father as president, he must be the front-runner, the kind of guy the GOP would fall in line for. But there’s no falling in line this year. He spent his first months staking out his position not as a creative, original chief executive of a major state—which he was—but as a pol raising shock-and-awe money and giving listless, unfocused interviews in which he slouched and shrugged. There was a sense he was waiting to be appreciated.

I speak of his candidacy in the past tense, which is rude though I don’t mean it rudely. It’s just hard to see how this can work. By hard I mean, for me, impossible.

http://hotair.com/archives/2015/10/30/qu...f-the-day-2240/