Jeb Bush suspended his presidential campaign Saturday, ending a quest for the White House that started with a war chest of $100 million, a famous name and a promise of political civility, but ended with a humbling recognition: in 2016, none of it mattered.
No single candidacy this year fell so monumentally short of its original expectations. It began with an aura of inevitability that masked deep problems, from Bush himself, a clunky candidate in a field of gifted performers, to the rightward drift of the Republican Party since Bush’s time as a consensus conservative in Florida.
Bush’s campaign had rested on a set of assumptions that, one by one, turned out to be flatly incorrect: that the Republican primaries would turn on a record of accomplishment in government; that Bush’s cerebral and reserved style would be an asset; and that a country wary of dynasties would evaluate this member of the Bush family on his own merits.
“We’ve had enough Bushes” his mother, Barbara Bush, observed, prophetically, before her son had announced his candidacy last summer.
In what turned out to be the year of the unconventional outsider, Bush conducted his campaign as the conventional insider.
Last summer, as Donald Trump prepared to declare his candidacy with an incendiary and improvised speech in New York City about the criminal records of immigrants from Mexico, Bush was in Eastern Europe, meeting with heads of state and delivering carefully calibrated remarks about the future of American diplomacy.
Bush, 63, the former two-term governor of Florida, failed to inspire Republican primary voters whose mood and needs had changed dramatically since he left government in 2007.
Now, they are eager for a candidate as angry and restless as they are. Standing on debate stages next to the likes of Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Bush never seemed to convincingly play the fighter figure.
After promising to conduct a “joyful” campaign, Bush instead found himself locked in an ugly and dejected slog, under gleeful attack from his rivals and heightened scrutiny from the political world he had thought was rooting for him.