Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Jeb Bush’s campaign is going nowhere, and that’s bad news for Jeb, but it’s good news for America. Now he just needs to perform one final service by dropping out. As a first step, he could follow Rand Paul out the door and skip Thursday night's debate.

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote in these pages that Jeb shouldn’t run.

I wrote: “There's nothing really wrong with Jeb Bush. By all accounts he was a good governor in Florida. He seems like a nice guy. And I have no doubt that he'd make a better president than, say, Barack Obama, though at this point in Obama's term that's setting the bar pretty low. Even the National Journal, which called Obama's past year ' pretty awful ,' might agree."

I continued: "But nice guy or not, he's old blood. Leaving aside the matter of the Bush name — though neither his 2016 opponents nor his 2016 supporters will — he last ran for political office back in 2002. He's fresh only insofar as he's George W. Bush's younger brother. Meanwhile, the GOP has a lot of actual fresh blood out there.”

Since then, Jeb’s campaign has never really gotten off the ground. Despite raising vast sums of money — and enriching various consultants in the process — Jeb hasn’t had a message that resonates with the American people. He has come across as entitled, expecting the nomination to just be handed to him because of his last name (Who does he think he is? Hillary?) and unwilling to make the sale.

Worse yet, he’s the candidate of the GOP establishment, which is in bad odor with GOP voters. After handing the GOP big wins in the midterms in 2010 and 2014, Republican voters wonder what, exactly, they got for their efforts. This Congress couldn’t even manage to defund the crony capitalist Export-Import Bank and keep it defunded: After a few months’ hiatus, it was funded again in the giveaway-filled highway bill that went to Obama in December.

Chertoff, Hayden: Jeb Bush offers leadership and vision

The GOP electorate doesn’t trust the establishment on spending. It doesn’t trust it on immigration. It doesn’t trust it on, well, much of anything. And Jeb is the face of that establishment.

Journalists I’ve spoken with who’ve interviewed Jeb say Bush comes across as resentful and bitter about this state of affairs. But if he aspires to any sort of political future, he could do himself a favor by just stepping out of the race now. What’s more, he could — as Roger Simon suggests — call for Hillary Clinton to drop out too, in light of her email and FBI problems. Writes Simon: “He will have the bully pulpit for that brief moment when he drops out and he can use it to tell the truth. America doesn't need another Bush, and it certainly doesn't need another Clinton, particularly one under the shadow of indictment.”

True enough, though I doubt Bush will take this advice. I expect him to play this out to the bitter end, and certainly the consultants will encourage that because they don’t get paid once he’s out.

Feckless leadership here and in Europe open doors for the fringe: Reynolds

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But there’s another bright spot. Jeb’s trump card was supposed to be the money. He raised a lot of money, and he has spent a lot of money. But it didn’t help. And that undercuts all the money-in-politics talk we’ve been hearing for years.

Concerns about the impact of money on politics assume that if you buy enough ads, you can elect anybody. If that were true, Jeb would be the front-runner. Instead, he’s running way behind other candidates who, in different ways, have done a better job of addressing voters’ concerns.

It turns out that addressing voters’ concerns is more important than slick TV spots. And that means the only campaign finance “reform” we need is for candidates (and donors) to quit tossing money at consultants and instead to speak to the American people about what the American people care about.

If nothing else comes from Jeb’s candidacy, that’s a valuable lesson indeed. Let’s hope that we learn it.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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