WaPo: Jeb Bush Is Losing His Joy

The joy has apparently left Jeb Bush's "joyful" campaign for the presidency, and his comments about the race on Sunday carried a "take-my-ball-and-go-home" tone that just wasn't very smart, Washington Post correspondent Chris Cillizza writes in his column for The Fix Monday.

"The way it comes off is that he is running for office as a favor for the American public and, if it doesn't work out the way he likes it, well, then, he has got far better things to do," Cillizza said.

During a Saturday town hall series in South Carolina, Bush slammed front-runner Donald Trump and the way the election is going, reports CNN, in a pointed argument that drew cheers from the crowd.

"If this election is about how we're going to fight to get nothing done, then I don't want anything, I don't want any part of it," he told the crowd. "I don't want to be elected president to sit around and see gridlock just become so dominant that people literally are in decline in their lives. That is not my motivation. I've got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, being miserable, listening to people demonize me and feeling compelled to demonize them. That is a joke. Elect Trump if you want that."

His campaign is downplaying the comments, even while Monday morning, another candidate, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that the former Florida governor sounded "a bit whiny."

And, Cillizza noted, while Bush had been initially touted as the candidate to defeat, he's been overshadowed by three others, brash Donald Trump, outsider and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, and by the younger Sen. Marco Rubio, who Bush had taken under his wing for mentoring in his earlier political days.

In addition, while Bush's war chest quickly totaled millions of dollars, last week he had to make cutbacks in his campaign when fundraising totals started to stall.

"Every question he gets from reporters is about why he isn't doing better and whether people just don't like him," writes Cillizza, noting that the same questions are likely coming from donors as well.

But at the same time, he writes to Bush, "you simply cannot say things" like were said in South Carolina, particularly about finding "really cool things" he could be doing.

"The public wants their candidates to act like running for office is an honor and a privilege," said Cillizza, and sometimes, that means even if you're a good politician, sometimes you have to fake it until you make it, and Bush appears to be fed up with the race.

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