I'm not big on writing obituaries of people who are not yet dead and buried, so I'll wait and see how this turns out for Fred; as things stand today it is certainly still entirely plausible that he could take the nomination. But a lot of us have had similar experiences. Fred is probably my second choice right now over McCain, and back in May or June I was seriously open to switching from Rudy to Fred if he had come roaring out of the gates with a really dynamite campaign. He didn't.
I think all of us have had times in our lives when we had an opportunity crop up - a job, a scholarship, a woman, whatever - that was just too good to pass on completely, but in our hearts we thought it was just too unlikely to work out, or not exactly what we wanted, to justify dropping everything and putting 110% effort into pursuing it. So you try, but you tell yourself that you will go this far for it and no farther, because it's not really worth humiliating yourself for, or missing out on other good things in life.
You can't run for president that way, not if you aren't George Washington. And Fred at times has seemed to do that - "Fred's way" meaning he will do this much, but no more; he won't drive himself to exhaustion, he won't humiliate himself, he won't put his campaign over his family, etc. Those are fine, normal human impulses, but they are not how you win primaries.
As Yogi once said, it gets late early out there. Joe's killer line is "I refuse to continue putting more energy into supporting him than he's put into his own campaign." If Fred wants normal people to put their lives on hold to make him president, he needs to look like he is doing the same thing.