Bush's Downfall: Don't Blame Trump

The post-mortems on Jeb Bush's failed campaign are rolling in. Some examples:

• Don't blame Donald Trump. "What killed Jeb Bush’s campaign was first the failure of his brother’s administration, and then the emergence of Marco Rubio to present a more attractive face for its continuation," writes Jonathan Chait at New York.
• Still, Peter Beinart at the Atlantic explains why Bush was Trump's "perfect foil."
• The Week sums things up by collecting 19 "devastating quotes" that compare coverage of Bush in early 2015 with more recent stories.

• One problem: His campaign underestimated "Bush fatigue," observes the Washington Post.
• Another: He didn't have advisers who could recognize shortcomings and, more importantly, point them out to Bush himself, says this piece in Politico Magazine.
• How on earth do you spend $130 million and have so little to show for it? The New York Times digs into "one of the least successful campaign spending binges in history."
• Those early stumbles on Iraq didn't help, notes CNN.
• Gary Legum at Salon bids "good riddance" to the "Bush Dynasty" with the question, "Can anyone think of another family dynasty that has had such a huge role in a particular stretch of American history, yet has almost zero hold on the country’s imagination?"

(More Jeb Bush 2016 stories.)