Jeb! is getting desperate, and it shows. And why not? Nothing that he’s tried in his very pricey campaign to become Bush III has worked.

The fraying of his nerves showed at a South Carolina campaign event when he made this remarkable assertion: “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, be miserable, listening to people demonize me and feeling compelled to demonize them. That is a joke. Elect Trump if you want that.”

Wow. That deserves at least two exclamation marks. No one who has ever heard one of Jeb!’s eye-glazing campaign speeches or, worse yet, one of his mind-numbing ruminations on education policy, would ever associate the word cool with the words Jeb Bush. But we’ll just have to take his word on this.

Jeb! can certainly take some comfort in the certain knowledge that most voters agree with him that he shouldn’t be elected president. In a campaign in which Jeb! has collected and spent gaudy amounts of campaign cash and gained the support of every organ of the political, business, and campaign-money establishment, his polls have been stuck in the mid-single-digits for weeks. Something in the range of 95 percent of Republican voters would just as soon Jeb! get to those cool things that await him back home in Miami ASAP.

How much longer can the joyful tortoise stay in a race that he’s barely registering in? If Jeb! is to remain borderline credible in the presidential race, it would help a lot if he could hit a home run in Wednesday’s night’s services in Boulder. But as of late he hasn’t even been making contact.