Fast-forward one day: “I interpreted the question wrong, I guess,” Bush told Sean Hannity in a radio interview. “I was talking about given what people knew then, would you have done it, rather than knowing what we know now. And knowing what we know now, you know, clearly there were mistakes.”

He still didn’t claim that he’d have done anything different than his brother had done. (“That’s a hypothetical.”) But he was really nailing down that business about mistakes.

Then Bush was off to Nevada, campaigning in his own special way. (“I’m running for president in 2016, and the focus is going to be about how we, if I run, how do you create high sustained economic growth.”)

He also announced that hypothetical questions were a “disservice” to the U.S. troops and their families.

What is going on here? It’s not actually about foreign policy. Jeb Bush clearly knows nothing whatsoever about foreign policy, but then neither do the majority of other Republican presidential hopefuls.

The bottom line is that so far he seems to be a terrible candidate. He couldn’t keep his “I’m-my-own-man” mantra going through the spring. He over-babbled at a private gathering. He didn’t know how to answer the Iraq question, which should have been the first thing he tackled on the first day he ever considered that he might someday think for even a minute about running for president.

This is obviously a problem for the Bush camp, but it’s a big one for the nation’s army of concerned citizens, too. There are lots of Americans who are not going to vote Republican next year, but who nevertheless have found some comfort in the idea that Jeb Bush would almost certainly be the Republican nominee.