He was your goofy dad, your awkward uncle. He bungled a policy rollout in Nevada when he called “Supergirl” “hot” (c’mon, Dad!), he was delightfully befuddled when his Apple Watch began ringing during a meeting with an Iowa newspaper, and he wiggled into a hoodie in a shaky YouTube video.

He talked with deep passion about space travel, and spoke to kids as if they were grown-ups, offering 8- and 9-year-olds treatises on the nation’s debt.

He fumbled for basic expressions, and some of his references and jokes made no sense — and yet we loved them anyway. There was the time Jeb put a crab in a frog metaphor. And the one about being “the bacon in the breakfast experience, not the egg,” whatever that meant. (We assumed it was something Paleo.) By the end of his campaign, I had a whole mental subcategory of Bush stories that I had nicknamed Zany Jeb.

But, at the core, what made Jeb compelling to cover was that he was deeply, impossibly human.

In a cycle where so many other candidates were able to toggle effortlessly between soaring speeches and masterful debate performances, between well-rehearsed outrage and manufactured indignation, Jeb almost seemed to think aloud in real time, and we got to watch him muddle and bumble through, just like any real person.