Byron York quotes various rival GOP strategists sniffing that this plays more like a general-election ad than one for the primaries.

Okay, tell me: What should a Jeb Bush primary ad look like? If he did four minutes of red-meat conservatism here, righties would laugh and shout, “Amnesty! Common Core!” Those votes are unwinnable. His path to the nomination runs through the center-right. He’s going to pitch himself to them the way centrist campaigns always do, as a non-ideological problem-solving pragmatist. This seems made to order.

The video is aimed particularly at women voters, underscoring the image Bush wants to project of himself as a deeply compassionate governor. “If you wonder what Jeb means when he talks about showing his heart, here you go.” senior Bush aide David Kochel tweeted when the video was released Sunday…

From a third Republican strategist: “This is a general-election bid that doesn’t address his biggest problems: 1) not exciting anyone, 2) not a conservative, 3) past, not future. It goes to Jeb’s expressed view that Mitt Romney lost because he wasn’t moderate enough.”

In a visit to May New Hampshire last month, Bush suggested that Romney’s problem was that he did not stress his own compassion and generosity before offering his campaign’s platforms. Romney “was a successful, loving, caring, generous man — and he never showed it,” Bush said. Voters, Bush continued, try to figure out whether a candidate understands their concerns before they consider the candidate’s programs: “Does he care about me? Do you like him? Does he have a sense of humor? Does he understand the fight I’m in? There’s some really basic questions you have to get to first before you get to the five-point plan to help people out.”

Amnesty gets all the ink but Romney’s gigantic deficit among Latinos against Obama in 2012 is just one of three core metrics the GOP is trying to improve on in 2016. The second is the gender gap. If women break more sharply for the First! Woman! President! than they did for O, our goose is cooked. Jeb, aware of the magnitude of the challenge, has evidently concluded there’s not a moment to lose in trying to close that gap so he’s targeting women even before he’s officially in the race. And the third core metric? You know what it is. Surely you’ve seen this table before from the 2012 exit poll:

If you wanted a president who shared your values, who’d be a strong leader, and who’d have a vision for the future, you were a Romney voter. If you wanted a president who “cares about people like me,” you were — overwhelmingly — an Obama voter. Final electoral vote results: Obama 332, Romney 206. Jeb’s going to try to fix that problem too, even if it means running de facto general-election ads 17 months out. What you’re seeing below, basically, is Team Jeb’s theory of “electability” in action. For Scott Walker, electability is youth, midwestern roots, executive experience, and an impressive achievement in remaking Wisconsin’s collective-bargaining laws for PEUs. For Marco Rubio, it’s youth, foreign-policy expertise, charisma on the stump, and demographic appeal among Latinos and Floridians. For Jeb Bush, it’s executive experience, an enormous war chest, and proof that he’s learned from Mitt Romney’s mistakes. Nominate the squishy well-funded guy this time, he’s telling establishmentarians, and you won’t have any ad libs about “the 47 percent” to worry about. Since the nominee is likely to be one of these three guys, you can consider the primaries a referendum on which theory of electability is most persuasive to GOPers.

One other noteworthy bit in this ad: It’s no accident that Jeb, already in general-election mode, would be emphasizing concrete policy achievements as governor over principles. Hillary Clinton’s got all the principles you could ever want or need, and if you don’t like her principles today, she’ll be happy to come up with different ones for you tomorrow. Engage her on principle and it’s a standard left/right battle next year. Engage her in terms of what policy reforms each of the nominees have achieved, however, and she’s got nothing. That’s her most glaring weakness — no one, even among her supporters, can point to anything she’s done in 20 years in and around Washington that would justify nominating her if her last name wasn’t “Clinton.” This is, essentially, Jeb’s rejoinder to the “dynasty” charge: He actually did some good for average people with his political privilege. What has Her Majesty done?