“That’s the issue here: Are you actually a unique, different person or are you a third Bush?” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. “To the degree that he’s defined as a third Bush, he has a bigger mountain to climb, though I think he certainly has the potential to carve out a path because he has an extraordinary record as governor.”…

“Jeb’s curb appeal was supposed to be experience, pedigree and smarts, and therefore ready to lead,” said one Republican senator, who insisted on anonymity to speak candidly about a presidential hopeful. “These kinds of statements plant him squarely in the middle of the primary pack — with G.O.P. voters unsure of exactly what political lessons he truly has learned.”…

“We need to know what we’re getting ourselves in for,” Mr. Paul said in an interview on Thursday. “The difficulty that Jeb is going to have is on two fronts. One, he’s got conservative mistrust in the primary. That’s going to be difficult to overcome. But should he become the nominee, he’s going to have difficulty with independents who were opposed to the Iraq war. I see it as a very difficult place for him to be in.”…

Or, as the conservative writer David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, put it on Twitter this week: “Jeb Bush has just converted an election that should be about the past eight years into an election about the eight years before that.”