Right after the campaign finance reports from third quarter of 2015 were made public we commented on the unsustainable nature of the Jeb Bush campaign. It was built on the idea that Jeb was inevitable and to be inevitable you must appear inevitable. You have to raise a lot of money and you have to spend the money lavishly. What happened to the Bush campaign is exactly what happened to the Scott Walker campaign. Both raised an initial burst of cash from major donors. Both had Super PACs vacuuming major donors. Neither had a base of small donors. The problem with this strategy is that all donors, regardless of personal wealth, have exactly the same cap for hard money donations and Super PACs can’t legally coordinate with the campaign or provide money to the campaign.

The third quarter fundraising report put Bush in fourth place in terms of cash on hand but he had spent $3 million more in the quarter than he had raised. He also had only thee times the number of small donors as Democrat Lawrence Lessig (you are right to ask, who the hell is he?).

(For all the Jeb Bush fundraising posts here | here | here | here)

So what do you do when you have tapped out all the big money, no new big money is interested in you and you have no small donors but you have a cash burn rate that, unless arrested, will see you battling with John Kasich for relevance? Well, you can bluster, which is what the moron running Bush’s Super PAC did earlier this month. Or you can start discounting the price of admission to your fundraisers and let the market determine what, if anything, you are worth. Via The Wall Street Journal: Jeb Bush’s Backers to Potential Donors: No Contribution? No Problem.

The price of meeting Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush is going down.

Earlier this year, before Mr. Bush became a candidate, he headlined fundraisers for his super PAC that cost as much as $100,000 to attend. Now, as the former Florida governor’s polling numbers drop and competition for campaign contributions​​ intensifies, his backers are inviting potential donors to meet Mr. Bush for free.

At a fundraiser on Wednesday hosted by Kenneth Lipper, former deputy mayor of New York and a bundler for Mr. Bush’s campaign, attendees will be encouraged to contribute but are not required to do so, according to a copy of the invitation viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

“While we are asking for contributions of $1,000 – $2,700, it is not necessary to make a commitment in order to come,” states the invitation, signed by Russell Reynolds, a Bush bundler and longtime GOP donor.​​ “We would like smart people to meet with Governor Bush and to hear what he has to say, and then make up your own minds. So feel no obligation financially, either now or in the future.”

I can save them the time. Smart people… and even not very smart people… have made up their mind and they’ve decided that Jeb Bush, for all his merits, is simply not the man to lead the nation. Smart and rich people didn’t get to be smart or rich by spending their money on crap like this:

Smart people may come to meet Bush, the way you visit a terminally ill relative from a sense of sympathy and respect, but the odds of them leaving their hard earned cash behind for Jeb’s campaign to make his father proud approaches zero.

At some point Governor Bush needs to look at the wall and perceive Mene, Meke, Tekel, Parsin scrawled upon it and leave the race before he becomes a cringe-inducing figure of fun.