So, Jeb! is now hitting the reset button. Now, it's Jeb 2.0.
Well, no, actually the new slogan is not as creative as Jeb 2.0. Instead, we now have: "Jeb can fix it."
It is a head-scratcher. And a head-shaker. It makes a screeching admission that something needs fixing. And no, the automatic thought of what it is that needs fixing is not our country. It's the candidate.
Jeb Bush greets people in the crowd after speaking at Geno's Chowder & Sandwich Shop in Portsmouth, N.H., ast week.Clearly Jeb Bush campaign advisers are underestimating not only the media but most importantly today's younger, more savvy voting public. They and other GOP advisers have done this all along. Instead of expanding their tent, they call for exporting 11 million immigrants. Instead of protecting seniors, they call for cutting Medicare and Social Security. Instead of building up the middle class, they call for tax cuts to people in Donald Trump's income bracket.
But hopefully what all of us are underestimating are the real Republican voters.
Why do we say hopefully? Because hopefully most of the people acting like groupies for Donald Trump, Dr. Ben Carson, Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Marco Rubio aren't actually voters - of any stripe. Hopefully, the fraction of Americans who will actually cast a primary vote may gape at the train wrecks of Trump, Carson, Cruz and company - but still vote for Jeb.
Make no mistake: America again needs a Democrat as president, and nothing - nothing - makes so clear a case for this fact as the Republican candidates and their nonsense in stump speeches and debates to date.
But at least Bush, among his peers in the train of wrecks, is rational and steady. And probably as decent and honest as a politician can be.
But Bush's reboot this week follows a bad debate performance and an embarrassing public evisceration Sunday by the scalding wit of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
"JEB, dragging his wilted exclamation point around, is so boring that it's hard to focus on the epic nature of his battle," Dowd opined in the very first sentence of a piece titled "Fall of the House of Bush."
Ouch! But that's far from the sharpest slice in the piece about how the Bushes - Jeb especially - have been asleep in their royal beds while this campaign became "defined by Trump parachuting in, like an Elvis impersonator in Vegas, and disrupting the royal coronation. Jeb had been out of politics for eight years and he strolled back, mistakenly assuming that the vassals were waiting eagerly to hail him."
More to point, he came back talking "pragmatic government at a time when the drivers in his party are talking about tearing it down," Dowd wrote.
Now the castle is afire. No Republican should be surprised that the base they've whipped up into mob frenzy now rejects sane, normal government. The mob now denounces dialogue, compromise and math that adds up - all things that go along with building and maintaining democracy.
The GOP public relations machine that we call talk radio has created this monster, and now Republicans - especially the party faithful - seem shocked at just how out-of-control the reckless, this "big government" fiction has gotten.
Now Trump and company are generating a new fiction: the nice and steady and dull guy next door is a loser.
Certainly Trump can generate some Kardashian-like excitement by firing people - especially celebrities - on The Apprentice. And, sure Carson can softly intone about Hitler and guns to get a press squeal. But should anyone trust their fingers on a nuclear launch button? Or the pen that signs the budget? Of the keys to the treasury? No, no, no.
Jeb Bush is an awkward campaigner - especially around these other showboats. But Bush can honestly make the case that he has best record as an effective leader of anyone in the GOP who is running for president.
And if Republicans can't see this, then they deserve Trump or Carson. The trouble is, the rest us don't. Not even just during the campaigns. And God forbid that one of them might somehow win.
It's a thought too frightening to contemplate. For all voters.