Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, moving closer to a possible presidential run, has resigned all of his corporate and nonprofit board memberships, including with his own education foundation, his office said late Wednesday night.

He also resigned as a paid adviser to a for-profit education company that sells online courses to public university students in exchange for a share of their tuition payments…

Aides said Bush wants to devote his time to exploring a return to politics rather than pursuing his business commitments. But separating himself from those interests now could also be a strategic attempt to prepare for the added scrutiny of a hotly contested campaign for the Republican nomination…

The effort underscores the lengths to which Bush — who has become the favorite prospective candidate of many major GOP donors and has been at or near the top of polls testing the possible Republican presidential field — appears willing to go to avoid pitfalls that hurt the party in 2012. That year, GOP nominee Mitt Romney, founder of a private-equity fund, struggled to explain his business background while under attack by GOP rivals and President Obama.

In his life before and after his terms as governor, Bush was active and successful in the worlds of big business, big finance, big real estate, big banking, big political fundraising. He has even dabbled in private equity and offshore investments, activities the Democrats and the mainstream media hammered Mitt Romney for in 2012. OK, they did it dishonestly, sometimes incoherently, but it cost Romney votes.

On the merits, there’s probably nothing wrong with the way Jeb Bush has earned his considerable living. Successful entrepreneurship is, after all, one of the great dreams and opportunities America provides. But many voters, including the hard-working middle-class, increasingly the heart of the Republican Party, don’t understand these worlds. If one stood in a shopping mall concourse interviewing shoppers, it might take several days to find someone who knows what a hedge fund is (hint: it has nothing to do with horticulture).

Fair or not, Bush’s overall résumé probably won’t help him. Many conservative voters will see Bush as worse than just a country club Republican. Heck, he and his pals own the damn country club. In order to accomplish what the country needs, the next president will have to engage and discomfit some very entrenched interests. These include many of the Bush family’s boardroom buddies and their K Street enforcers. Is Jeb the guy to do this, many Republican voters will ask?

Bush was, however, inscrutable when he recently mused about the possibility of a presidential campaign that would “lose the primary to win the general.” This sounds like a baseball strategy that requires stealing first base. There is a reason this has not been tried: the rules of the game.

Still, it is bracing that Bush might bring to nomination politics the spirit of another son of a president, John Quincy Adams, who said America’s leaders should not be “palsied by the will of our constituents.” Bush, 61, is the tax-cutting, fiscally austere, school-choice-promoting, gun-rights-protecting, socially conservative, Spanish-speaking former two-term governor of the most important swing state. But for some Republicans, his virtues and achievements are vitiated by his positions on immigration and the Common Core education standards.

Regarding the former, Bush’s critics should read “Immigration Wars,” the book he co-wrote with Clint Bolick of the intellectually impeccable Goldwater Institute, the gold standard of conservative think tanks. Bush and Bolick favor less immigration for family reunification (an idea opposed by many Hispanic activists), more for meeting workforce needs (high-skilled and entrepreneurial immigrants, as well as seasonal workers), and a path to legalization but not citizenship for those here illegally. If these ideas, put forward by persons with Bush’s and Bolick’s conservative pedigrees, are grounds for political excommunication, Republican presidential politics is going to be a sterile process of serial tantrums by veto groups.

If you look at Jeb Bush’s record as governor, it can’t be seriously argued that he’s not a conservative. I think the distinction to make here is that he is a pre-Obama conservative. The last six years have marked an entire epoch of Republican politics — defined by the rise of the Tea Party and the fight against Obama’s agenda — that Bush has largely been absent from. His last year in office was 2006, and the last time he was on the ballot was 2002 — long before anyone had heard of Barack Obama. Bush’s most attention-getting forays into the national debate in recent years have been defenses of positions on immigration and Common Core anathema to populist conservatives who have been ascendant in the Obama years, and statements scolding the current Republican party for what Bush considers its various deficiencies. One of the main questions that his presumed presidential campaign will have to answer is why he should lead a party that has undergone a generational change, that has been ideologically refreshed, and that has been tested in the fights against Obamacare and other Obama initiatives since the last time he ran for office.

If Jeb were to serve as governor of Florida again, his actions in those areas of responsibility where states are paramount — especially education and state taxation and regulation — would likely still be conservative. It seems to me that Jeb’s real problem is that some of his views are unfit for the national conservative stage, rather than the state, and always have been.

Even before the effervescence of the Tea Party in 2009–10, conservative voters were opposed to federal takeover of education and skeptical of open immigration. As governor, it was perfectly appropriate for him to establish new statewide standards for schools and, from what little I know of the matter, they seem to have been successful. But he made the mistake of applying that same thinking to the national level, something conservatives have opposed long before the Tea Party; in fact, the Republican platform of 1980 called for the abolition of the Department of Education just two months after the department came into being. In contrast, Jeb’s views on immigration — a combination of sentimentalism with corporate cronyism — have never been shared by the Republican base, but as governor they had little saliency, since it’s mainly a matter for the national government.

I think it is just important way to think of Jeb Bush as a reaction to Obama’s political success. Specifically, Jeb Bush’s strategy is based on how the Republican lobbyist and donor classes interpreted Obama’s 2012 victory.

Basically, the Republican establishment blamed their 2012 defeat on social conservatives and opponents of upfront amnesty for unauthorized immigrants. The Republican establishment asserted that the policy problem with Romney’s failed establishment candidacy was that it did not sufficiently focus on the preferences and priorities of the Republican establishment. That’s very convenient when you think about it.

The Republican establishment did not talk much about the economic weaknesses of Romney’s tax plan (which focused on tax cuts for high-earners). Like Rich Lowry says, Jeb Bush is ready to be critical of the Republican party. But he is much more ready to be critical on the issue of immigration than on an economic program that had a majority of Americans believing that Romney’s agenda primarily benefited the rich rather than the middle-class. Apparently for Bush, the lobbyists, the consultants, and most of the donors, Romney’s economic agenda wasn’t the problem – regardless of what the public said.

[O]n the Republican side heading into the next presidential election, candidates will look to former staffers in the George W. Bush administration to fill out their teams. But this creates an especially thorny issue for Jeb.

One of the biggest challenges facing Jeb Bush — both during the primaries and the general election — is how he would be able to demonstrate that he’s different from his brother. But that effort will be complicated when a lot of former staffers of his brother’s administration inevitably join his team. Even if he brings on his own advisers from his days in Florida, the presence of former George. W. Bush staffers is going to be amplified.

Ultimately, this is part of a larger issue confronting Jeb, which is that being from the Bush family brings with it a lot of perks — immediate access to a large network of staffers, connections to major donors, and instant name recognition — but it’s hard to take advantage of them on the one hand, while trying to deflect charges that he’s running for his brother’s third term.

This time around, it’s equally possible that the establishment will be split between Jeb Bush and Chris Christie. Marco Rubio may compete for some of Bush’s donor base. There are plenty of conservatives who could take the plunge who have run something bigger than a pizza chain.

The poll that so far shows Bush doing the best still has him running well behind his father or brother at a comparable point in the campaign. In fact, his numbers are weaker than Giuliani’s in 2007. Giuliani, who was counting on Florida to carry him through, didn’t win a single primary.

Even successful establishment candidates must “pander” to conservatives. History hasn’t been kind to the candidates who have given them the finger, from McCain 2000 to Jon Huntsman in 2012.

The best way to run for president without conservative support is to seek the Democratic nomination.

The data are also persuasive on another point. Mr. Romney won the nomination the same way most modern-day nominees of both parties win — by shoring up the endorsements of party leaders before the first primary.

“When a fight breaks out, watch the crowd,” E.E. Schattschneider wrote in “The Semi-Sovereign People” in 1960. If you want to track Mr. Bush’s chances of winning the nomination, watch the crowd — the elite crowd in particular.

Mr. Romney won the protracted G.O.P. nomination in 2012 not by convincing voters he had moved to the right, but by convincing party leaders and other elites that he was the most viable candidate in the race. Mr. Bush can do the same.

There is no evidence and no reason to believe that Mr. Bush — or Mr. Romney — is unelectable in 2016 because of the demands of the conservative wing of the party. This is not to say that the campaigns candidates run or the messages they send don’t matter. They just don’t matter in this way.