Jeb Bush super PAC airing George W. Bush ad

“I didn’t really plan on this”, the 90-year-old joked, wearing a vibrant green shirt and black scarf.

“The connection between mom and dad and people here in the Granite State is phenomenal”, Bush said. “And he’s everything we need in a president”. “I don’t know how women can vote for someone who said what he said about [Fox News anchor] Megyn Kelly”.

“But he has never done anything in his life”, Bush said at Globe Manufacturing, the same firefighter-suit producer Rubio had visited a day earlier.

Fiorina’s campaign is heading into New Hampshire “feeling very, very good about where we are”, she said Monday. “She’s one of the most popular women in America”.

But many observers say Bush has an extremely tough battle ahead of him.

“We’ve been here for over two hours, and we haven’t gotten paid for our time”, one man said, according to the Des Moines Register.

Former president George W. Bush cut an ad for brother Jeb’s super PAC, and now the candidate himself says the ex-White House occupant will stump for him this month in a key primary state.

Former first lady Barbara Bush is urging voters in both a new video and in a hand-written letter to vote for her second-eldest son, making her first public appearance on behalf of his campaign. “I don’t advise him, but if I gave him advice: I would say, ‘Why don’t you interrupt like the other people do [in debates]?'”

“Please clap,”Jeb Bush implored the crowd, as if he were trying to get their help to resurrect Tinker Bell after she heroically drank the poisonous brew of listening to his stump speech in its entirety”.

Mired in single-digit support, squeezed into a crowded establishment lane with two governors including Christie and Ohio’s John Kasich, and his measured tone overwhelmed by the loud rhetoric of the 2016 presidential race, Bush faces a steep climb out of irrelevance.

And a loss wouldn’t necessarily end Jeb Bush’s career, with the prospect of becoming a running mate or Cabinet secretary still at least a possibility. “We got a long way to go”.

She shot back, “I don’t think so because another Bush is going to beat another Clinton”.

Bush fully embraced his family’s legacy on Wednesday night. “Listen, I’m 73”, he said. I’m proud of my brother.

“Yes, I mean unbelievable”, Mrs. Bush responded, picking up the cue.

With his unique family position, Bush acknowledged that he has had a “front-row seat” to the national and world stage.

But critics argue that all the in-fighting could hurt the establishment brand and pave a path for Donald Trump or Sen. I won’t trash talk. In a packed middle school cafeteria, he was acutely aware of the “looming presence of Barbara Bush” that he often invokes. Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary is essentially now a race between Bush and Rubio – not for first, but for survival.

Mr Bush’s relative liberalism on immigration and his inability to excite, has left his campaign floundering. “I think the one thing that the Republicans have to do at this point is start pointing that arrow at the right person”.

They just didn’t seem to like him.

On a cold New Hampshire morning, with the temperature dipping to just six degrees, Nick Del’Etoile attended the latest in a series of presidential candidate forums hosted by the Derry Chamber of Commerce.

And in 2000, when her son was in a virtual dead heat with McCain, she appeared at a town hall meeting with the rest of the family and told the crowd: “Thank you for all you’re doing for my boy”. “New Hampshire people do”.