It’s hard not to summon at least a smidgen of sympathy for a candidate whose quaint credo was an appeal to a kind of decency in public life that has gone out of fashion. In 1994, when he lost the governorship of Florida that his family thought would be his, and his brother won the Texas governorship that once seemed unlikely, the first President Bush famously—and awkwardly—declared, “The joy is in Texas, but our hearts are in Florida.”

Four years later, on the morning of Jeb’s second, winning try at the job, the elder Bush so dreaded a possible encore that he confessed to his Secret Service agent, “I am one pathetic nervous wreck,” and told his old friend the journalist Hugh Sidey that he didn’t want to be with Jeb if he lost, “because it would hurt him even more to have us there.”
Unless he engages in public introspection atypical of his clan, we may never know what combination of sibling rivalry and public-spiritedness impelled Bush to embark upon a bruising, even humiliating, campaign that he would now surely not wish on even his own worst enemy. Whether the exercise, and its ashen result, should be a matter of pity or scorn is the eye of the beholder, of course.

Yet no epitaph for Bush’s effort could be simpler or truer than the words uttered by one of his longtime advisers on the eve of the New Hampshire primary. “We’re in striking distance in New Hampshire,” he told me with a bit of excessive optimism, before adding with dead-eyed aim: “But they’re not buying what we’re selling this year.”