Jeb Bush, making his first visit to New Hampshire as a likely presidential candidate, implicitly criticized his Republican rivals for the nomination for changing their positions on difficult issues.

Discussing his support for the Common Core education standards, which are viewed unfavorably by many Republicans, Mr. Bush said, “you don’t abandon your core beliefs” just because a position appears unpopular.

“The way I’ve sorted it out is: I think you need to be genuine, I think you need to have a backbone. I think you need to able to persuade people this is a national crisis, this is a national priority,” Mr. Bush told a group of New Hampshire business and education executives.

Asked after his remarks who exactly lacked backbone, he said: “I have it — that’s all I said.”

When Bush is asked about Common Core, he doesn’t let himself get pulled into the weeds about individual curriculum choices that schools have been developing and making in response to the standards. Instead, he reframes Common Core as a common-sense effort at accountability in public education: “Raising expectations and having accurate assessments of where kids are is essential for success, and I’m not going to back down on that,” the former Florida governor said.

Some conservative commentators have interpreted Bush’s strategies as a a replay of Jon Huntsman’s base-baiting 2012 campaign. But Huntsman seemed to be uninterested in conservative support entirely. Bush’s rhetorical game might actually win their respect.

Bush doesn’t come to conservatives as Mitt Romney did, with a basket full of new convictions. Bush’s efforts to sell his positions to conservative voters is an implicit message that he wants conservatives to support him. It also helps that he keeps hiring political and activist figures who have a devoted following among the most conservative parts of the right.

Even if conservatives can’t get everything they want, they seem to appreciate knowing where the GOP candidate stands, and what they can expect from him. In a way, Bush is giving the movement a compliment by disagreeing forthrightly, and selling his position to them anyway.

Walker’s approach also contrasts badly with Jeb Bush’s. Bush has been hiring policy brains and strategic brawn from across the right and center-right. He recently hired the social conservative legal activist Jordan Sekulow. Jordan is the son of Jay Sekulow, a pioneer in forming the modern right’s commitment to religious liberty issues at home. The hire was not well-received in the media. It was described as a “lurch to the right.” A number of stories bringing up Jordan Sekulow’s support for anti-gay rights laws in Africa popped up across the media.

Did Bush panic and throw Sekulow under the bus? Nope. He assumes, correctly, that adults won’t confuse the positions of one of his hires with his own. And as it happens, having people who disagree with you on staff is incredibly useful.

If you were a top expert, a policy-thinker, or a consultant, which candidate would you want to work for? The guy who tosses his people out on the say-so of an Iowa Republican whose name he had just learned, or Jeb Bush, who doesn’t give a jus exclusivæ to his enemies?

To understand the strangeness of the position that Jeb Bush finds himself in, it helps to look at his record as a practicing politician—a governor. When he left office in 2007, the verdict on his tenure was unanimous among Republicans, “moderates” and right-wingers alike. Writing in this magazine at the time, Fred Barnes summed it up: After two terms in office, Bush was not only the best governor in America but also the most conservative. Moreover, Republicans assumed that he was the former because he was the latter: His success was directly attributable to his ideology. That he should now be condemned as a moderate is a new and unexpected lesson in the education of Jeb Bush…

“I just think it’s humorous,” Tom Feeney says now, when reminded that lots of reporters and Republicans are calling Bush a moderate. “It’s pure revisionism for anyone to ignore the fact that he was the most conservative governor in the country.”…

Reading up on Bush’s record and talking about it with the (worshipful) people who helped make it happen, you might start to wonder: Is he pulling a Reverse Bush? For years conservative Republicans accused his father and brother of being closet moderates who only talked like conservatives for the sake of politics; the charge was generally accurate. Maybe Jeb is reversing the trick: a self-conscious, deep-dyed conservative who for the moment feels the need to look like a moderate, especially before an admiring press and in the company of the wealthy Republicans who these days are his constant companions and marks. 

It’s a dicey strategy, if it’s a strategy at all. His constant refrain—he will use government according to conservative principles to help people—may fall flat in a party whose members, lots of them, don’t think they want government to help them at all; they just want it to leave them alone. Republicans still laugh at the old joke about the biggest lie: “I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help you.” Can Jeb Bush persuade them it’s not a joke after all?

All across Wall Street and the rest of the nation, donors who attended high-dollar Bush events are whispering that the former Florida governor could raise as much as $100 million in the first quarter of the year — and maybe $500 million by June, if not significantly more. Either feat would smash records and send shock waves through the rest of the GOP presidential field…

Other people close to Bush privately use more colorful language to talk down the fundraising figures, noting that Mitt Romney’s Restore Our Future PAC spent just $43 million for the entire 2012 primary season. One adviser called the $100 million by March 31 figure a “total fantasy.”…

Rollins on Monday did not back off the number at all. “That is the goal and there is no reason to think they cannot reach that goal,” Rollins said in an interview, basing his figure on conversations with multiple Bush donors. “He’s been incredibly effective going to people and saying, ‘I want a million bucks and I want it now.’ No one has a machine like he does. And if he does put together that kind of money, it will chase some people out of the field.”

“Clearly, he’s smart, there’s no question about that,” said Bob Knight, a lobbyist who watched Bush speak in Greenville and ­Columbia, S.C. “You can buy that — but can you buy charisma? Does he have the charisma to win?”…

Virtually all the voters who show up to see Bush say they are reserving judgment until they see other candidates.

“I want to know more about him,” Dennis Cavanaugh of Murrells Inlet, S.C., said after Bush’s visit to Myrtle Beach. Cavanaugh said that after Obama, the country needs to do a better job vetting the next president. “Anybody and his brother can run for office — literally. I think that’s part of what the big problem is.”

Conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham declared that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush “will lose” if he’s the GOP presidential nominee next year…

“I think a populist pitch is a winner across the country — in Hispanic, white, black communities, I’m telling you it is a winner. We can peel off some minority voters, focus on their wages, their renewal. I’m telling you, it’s a winner,” she said. “Not this old Chamber of Commerce faux-conservative big business message. That is a crony capitalist disaster. And I’m sorry, but that’s what the Bush folks represent and that’s what the Bush nomination will do. It will lose.”

But if the former governor’s campaign will be awash in money, it’s equally true his support among primary voters and caucus attendees will be much shallower. Movement conservatives in the GOP are unlikely to embrace him any time before the general election kicks off, and that gives others in the race an opening…

Romney attracted 25 percent of the vote in each of the last two Iowa GOP caucuses, suggesting the former Florida governor can “win” the caucuses if the field is heavily fractured and conservative caucus attendees never coalesce around one or two alternatives to Bush.

Culturally and ideologically, New Hampshire would appear to be better territory for Bush. But the state hasn’t always performed well for candidates with his last name. George Bush won the primary in 1988 and 1992, but underperformed both times, and George W. Bush lost the Granite State’s primary to McCain in 2000.

As for Bush, he remains at the top of our list, but questions abound. There is far more resistance to this Bush than his father or brother encountered in 1988 or 2000, respectively. Bush fatigue is very real, it’s intense in some quarters, and it goes way beyond immigration or Common Core. Bush has many things going for him: connections, money, talented staff, and substantive policy rhetoric, just to name a few. But he appears to be lacking something important, too: real popular appeal to grassroots voters, as opposed to the establishment. It’s obviously very early, but initial polling finds many Republicans lukewarm or openly hostile toward his candidacy.

Should Bush overcome intraparty opposition to win the nomination, the GOP may suffer from turnout problems with part of the base, even if the base likes the eventual vice presidential nominee. Moreover, Bush may be exactly the Republican the Clinton campaign desires. Her people are well rehearsed and they all say, “The candidate we’d least want to face is Jeb Bush.” In actuality, this suggests that the candidate the Clintonistas may really want to run against is Bush, knowing that most of the outsider candidates won’t be able to win the nomination and other serious contenders such as Walker or Rubio could make a strong future-versus-past argument. And with Bush, Hillary Clinton can run against two Bush recessions and two Bush Middle East wars, asking “do you want a third?”

But among all Republican primary voters, just 22 percent would see a … candidate [who supports a path to citizenship for illegals] more favorably, with 62 percent less favorably. Segmenting out various slices of the GOP primary electorate, among those who identify with the tea-party movement, just 7 percent would see the pathway-supporting candidate more favorably, 82 percent less favorably…

Just 25 percent would see a pro-Common Core candidate more favorably, 52 percent less favorably. Among tea-party GOP primary voters, just 13 percent would see that candidate more favorably, 72 percent less. GOP primary voters who identify more with a values agenda are somewhat less antagonistic to the standards: 24 percent more favorably, 56 percent less favorably, minus 32 points. Even among those GOP primary voters who consider themselves more liberal or moderate, only 29 percent would see the pro-Common Core candidates more favorably, 43 percent less favorably, minus 14 points.

None of this is to argue that Bush can’t win the GOP nomination; after all, he has some real advantages. But the ideological headwinds, just on these two issues to start, are extremely strong.

[Sen. Rand] Paul told Breitbart News:

“We believe that the message of ‘leave me alone’ that forms sort of the ‘leave me alone coalition’ forms this group of people that we think supports the things I’m trying to do is a big enough and broad enough coalition to win in a Republican primary but is also a big enough and broad enough to bring independents and others afterwards. There are two different tactics you could try to do if you want to bring in independents: You could be Democrat-light and run the Jeb Bush campaign that’s uncomfortable with the grassroots of your party and you could run this campaign that’s like ‘I’m almost like Hillary Clinton but not quite’ and then you can get the independents or I think you could run a truly principled campaign as a Constitutional conservative but also still show how the message that big government messes everything up from business to taxes to regulation also can be applied to criminal justice. That big government messes up criminal justice and doesn’t treat people fairly because big government is incompetent. Big government is incapable of feting out justice sometimes because it is too large. So I think there is a possibility, a great possibility, a truly principled Constitutional limited government conservative message, could resonate out to a bigger audience. We try to take it everywhere. We also try to go where Republicans haven’t been going, to the tech community, to historically black colleges, to Berkeley, to places like that with a hope of showing that we can broaden the message. That’s what people will want if we’re the nominee.”

In talking to GOP voters and donors, the skepticism about Bush is palpable. There’s concern that he’s too moderate. Some have told me they worry he’s not enough of a “fighter” and will simply try and ride his family coattails into the nomination. His speeches are wonky instead of fiery. At the same time, Bush, at this point at least, seems to understand that while he can stand on principle, he can do so without sticking a finger in the eye of the GOP base. Unlike Jon Huntsman, who seemed more interested in showing Republican voters how wrong they were Bush hasn’t slipped into lecturing mode. Watch his appearance at CPAC and you see a guy who at least appears to understand the difference between meeting voters where they are (which is wary of his positions on issues) and one who thinks he can bring people to where he thinks they “should’ be. In politics, like in marriage, winning the argument at all costs is usually the wrong choice…

Bush’s attempts to thread the needle on immigration and Common Core may fall flat. GOP voters start out skeptical about his true motives. However, it remains to be seen if perceptions of Bush change once voters get a chance to compare him to his opponents. The debates will be critical proving grounds. Right now, however, most Republican voters are in expectation mode. They are like a princess who is eager to be swept off her feet by a dashing prince. Today they can dream of that perfect prince. But, in politics, unlike in fairy tales, the prince you end up with is often not the one you dreamed about.