If Jeb Bush finishes fourth or fifth, as the polls predict, what is his rationale for trudging on? Will honchos at the campaign and the super PAC manage to convince themselves that somehow everything will change before Super Tuesday, when a bonanza of delegates is at stake? The people on Team Bush are far too experienced to seriously believe that wishing and hoping constitute a plan.

If Bush does have to fold after Saturday, it will be a shame. For one thing, we’ll be deprived of all the odd, off-key, often mystifying things he says and does. Of all the candidates in both parties, only Trump offers better entertainment value.

Part of Bush’s problem is his difficulty in forming comprehensible sentences. This is, of course, a family trait. Years ago, when George Bush the Elder held a joint news conference with the president of Uruguay, the South American leader promised to “answer any questions in my broken English, which is, of course, our common language.” George Bush the Younger once said that one job of the president was to “keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”