“With no love lost for Jeb Bush among the Republican base, the Iowa caucuses could be an early stumbling block in his 2016 quest,” The Hill reports.

“The former Florida governor’s business-friendly stances and willingness to criticize GOP hard-liners make him popular with the donor class. But the first-in-the-nation state hasn’t been kind to establishment candidates in recent years.”

“He would be the first president who organized overseas tax havens for billionaire Benedict Arnolds.”

— Paul Begala, quoted by Bloomberg, about Jeb Bush’s presidential ambitions.

Ed Kilgore: “In two solid years of being pitted against Hillary Clinton in polls, Bush has not led a single one, and trails her in the latest RealClearPolitics average by over 9%. That’s a poorer margin than for Ryan (6%), Christie (7%), and Huckabee (8%), and about the same as for Paul. Ted Cruz is the only regularly polled putative GOP candidate running significantly worse than Bush against HRC (an RCP average gap of 13%), and that’s largely because he’s far less well-known.”

Marc Ambinder: “Bush’s biggest opportunity corresponds to the biggest hole in the GOP platform: its radio silence on practical economic solutions for the middle class, which, it turns out, corresponds to the biggest bread-and-butter concern that Americans repeatedly chastise Washington for not addressing.”

“If he can move beyond supply-side economics and invent or adopt policies that directly benefit middle class voters who aren’t big savers, if he can speak to their concerns, if he can draw for us a picture for how a governing conservative president might function, then everything I’ve ever said about him — namely, that he’s a Bush and he can’t win the presidency, much less the nomination — goes out the window. If he can square THIS hexagon, and if he can get people to forget that he’s a Bush, he might be able to win both.”

“If you want a government that’s gonna intrude on your life, enforce their personal views on you, then I guess Jeb Bush is your man.”

— Michael Schiavo, quoted by Think Progress, on being overruled by Bush for his decision to remove his wife Terri’s feeding tube after cardiac arrest had left her in a vegetative state.

Smart Politics finds that the 14 years between Jeb Bush’s last electoral victory in 2002 and the presidential election of 2016 would be the longest such gap recorded by any victorious presidential candidate in more than 150 years.

[speech_bubble type=”std” subtype=”a” icon=”pwdome.jpg” name=””]And it will have been 10 years for Hillary Clinton. [/speech_bubble]

Nate Silver: “The short answer: We’ll see, and we’ll want to watch for news of Republicans who endorse Bush’s candidacy or criticize it. But he’s probably more like Romney or McCain than like Huntsman or Giuliani.”

“Last year, we constructed ideological scores for a set of plausible 2016 Republican candidates based on a combination of three statistical indices… Bush scores at a 37 on this scale, similar to Romney and McCain, each of whom scored a 39. He’s much more conservative than Huntsman, who rates at a 17.”

“Still, Bush is more like his father, George H.W. Bush, who rates as a 33, than his brother George W. Bush, who scores a 46. And the Republican Party has moved to the right since both Poppy and Dubya were elected.”

The Fix: “The thinking in Bush world, according to this strategist, was that the best way to combat these series of negative stories was to make a semi-definitive declaration of intent — changing the storyline, at least for the moment… There is also the calculation that if Bush is going to get scrutiny from the media as though he’s an announced candidate, he should also get the benefits of being a close-to-announced candidate. At least one prominent Republican consultant disagreed with that assessment, however.”

“Aside from changing the narrative, another argument I heard in my conversations was that Bush hasn’t actively campaigned in a very long time and has shown signs in the past year or two — see the release of his book in 2013 — that he needs some work.”

Said one GOP consultant: “The guy is rusty. He hasn’t done this is a while. He will now have more of a preseason; after a flurry of attention, he will be off Broadway.”