Sure, George W. Bush looks good these days. Barack Obama would make any president (other than Jimmy Carter) look good in hindsight. But that’s because people rarely think about Bush and, even in politics, absence often makes the heart grow fonder.

But Jeb doesn’t seem to realize the value is in the absence, not in the appeal to authority, not in sharing a strategery (even an ingrinable one) with a man who was below 30 percent approval for much of his last year in office—a fact of which Hillary, her supporters, and the George Stephanopouloses of the world will remind everyone at every turn in 2016.

With every brotherly mention of George W. Bush, the forty-third president’s unpopularity—between June 2005 and the time he left office in January 2009, he never had approval ratings as high as his disapproval ratings and by the end they were two-to-one against him—rubs off on Jeb.

So Jeb’s answer to Kelly convinced me he will never be able to adequately distance himself from his older brother. He can’t even if the “mainstream” media would let him, and you know they won’t. There’s always another Candy Crowley so eager to “help.”