Photograph by Joe Raedle/Getty

“The Presidency should not be passed on from one liberal to the next,” John Ellis Bush, better known as Jeb—or, as his new campaign logo renders the name, “Jeb!”—said in a speech formally announcing his candidacy, at Miami Dade College, on Monday. It seemed to be one of his answers to the concern that we are headed for an election in which, whether a Democrat or a Republican wins, the Presidency will be passed from one member of a Presidential family to another. But he also suggested that this dynastic moment is just one of those things that makes America great: “In this country of ours, the most improbable things can happen as well. Take that from a guy who met his first President on the day he was born, and his second on the day he was brought home from the hospital!”

Logically, that should have been “future President,” since, when Jeb was born, George H. W. Bush, himself the son of a senator, was just starting in the oil business, and George W. was a six-year-old—but never mind. The stranger notion is that there is anything improbable about the children of a wealthy, well-connected family achieving high political office. (In fairness, maybe Jeb hasn’t gotten over the weirdness of George W.’s ascent.) After the two-Presidents line, Bush directed the audience to “the person who handled both introductions,” his mother, Barbara Bush. She was there in a peach cardigan and pearls—Jeb was wearing an open-collar shirt with no tie—and waved. Many members of the audience echoed the gesture with their red-and-white “Jeb!” thundersticks. Of course, Hillary Clinton has built her brand around her first name, too. Foreigners might think that we call our candidates by their first names because we have a casual, informal culture. Really, it’s because we don’t want to confuse them with their relatives in politics.

What is more surprising, to some observers, is that Bush’s campaign got off to such a bumpy start. This was supposed to be easy for him. He would raise a great deal of money early, sign up all the right operatives, the Party would gather around, and other contenders would either realize that there was no point in running or fade away, with maybe a few hanging around to give him some debating practice. He was, in a word, supposed to be the Republican Hillary Clinton. But the only part that has worked out so far is the money part. Bush has raised a great deal of it, but thanks to Citizens United there is such an extraordinary amount of money around that he hasn’t, in doing so, cut off the supply to his opponents. There are a good dozen of them, as Bush acknowledged with another only-in-America line—“It’s nobody’s turn. It’s everybody’s test, and it’s wide open—exactly as a contest for President should be.” But he’s also, it has to be said, not where Clinton is, in terms of experience and voter familiarity. His record in Florida came up frequently in his speech, but his two terms as governor are more comparable to her term and a third as senator when she ran the first time. Bush is, in effect, running the Hillary 2008 campaign—the one that didn’t end as initially expected.

Hillary Clinton was Bush’s main target in the speech—part of “the Obama-Clinton-Kerry team,” with “their phone-it-in foreign policy,” leading America to “the greatest risk of all—military inferiority.” He also said, “Secretary Clinton insists that when the progressive agenda encounters religious beliefs to the contrary, those beliefs, quote, ‘have to be changed.’ That’s what she said, and I guess we should at least thank her for the warning.” That’s not quite what she said. Speaking at the Women in the World conference, in April, she was talking about the failure of many countries to enforce laws giving girls the right to primary education and providing women access to safe childbirth and protection from domestic violence. For that pattern to be corrected, she said, “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed.” It was not deftly phrased, but it was also not a call for the surrender of religion to “the progressive agenda.”

Bush’s point, though, was to connect Clinton negatively with the larger push for “religious freedom,” as a conservative reason to reject everything from the Affordable Care Act to the legal right of gays and lesbians to marry in North Carolina. He cited what he said was the “galling example” of the “shabby treatment of the Little Sisters of the Poor”; nuns, he suggested, had been punished because they “dared to voice objections of conscience to Obamacare.” In truth, the Little Sisters is a Catholic order that runs a hospital and has gone to court to challenge the A.C.A.’s contraceptive-coverage mandate for its employees—even though, as a religious order, it can already get an exemption to that mandate. Its argument is that even having to fill out the form for the exemption is a violation of the order’s principles. Bush, in one of his big applause lines, said, “It comes down to a choice between the Little Sisters and Big Brother, and I’m going with the Sisters.” But, given that the case is about the casuistry of what it means to fill out a form, Bush might be more on the side of Kafka on this one.

Bush brought up the Little Sisters, no doubt, because he and his advisers are still trying to figure out how ideological he should appear. Conservatives don’t think he’s conservative enough, but moderates don’t seem certain that he’s really all that moderate. On almost every issue, except possibly immigration (there was a Spanish-language section in the speech), the moderates are right. A couple of months ago, Bush finally acknowledged that, maybe, something had to be done about climate change. Then, in May, he seemed to grumpily backtrack, saying that the question of human responsibility for climate change was “convoluted,” and that “for the people to say the science is decided on this is just really arrogant, to be honest with you. It’s this intellectual arrogance that now you can’t have a conversation about it even.”

Bush did not, in his speech, entirely dispel the sense that there was something arrogant, or presumptuous, in his own pursuit of the Presidency. “We don’t need another President who merely holds the top spot among the pampered élites of Washington.” But maybe, the well-funded campaign-launch affair suggested, being among the élite wouldn’t hurt: you need a President who belongs. (At another point, Bush told the audience that he was “not just another member of the club.”) There was talk of a state visit to Cuba by “our outgoing President,” he said. “But we don’t need a glorified tourist to go to Havana in support of a failed Cuba. We need an American President to go to Havana in solidarity with a free Cuban people, and I am ready to be that President.” Both Clinton and Bush have, in their ways, suggested that Obama is a sort of tourist—an anomaly, just passing through. They know what to do in Washington. Jeb knows all about Presidents.