W ran as a conservative, and triangulated on a few issues..following the Clinton strategy of the 90s. Run on the core pillars of conservatives, and offer a policy to seniors, latinos, and women to gain more of their votes (the Medicare reform, immigration reform, and education reform). It was a blueprint that largely worked. At the same time, he was airtight on social conservatism, rebuilding the military and offering supply side tax reform that reduced everyone’s taxes.
In practice, he was terrible on spending, sold out too much to government growth in a lot of areas (some necessary due to 9/11, and some unnecessary - education). He was not lock step small government conservative by any stretch, but he was good on some of the issues to get elected.
We can do better than W, but we also can’t ignore the electoral success of two term election wins.
I don't think any conclusions about what type candidate to run can be drawn from W's two wins. Those were two of the narrowest wins in recent history and he had the significant advantage of huge name recognition on his side.
Who can say if the Rove strategy of pandering to groups won more votes for W than it lost? If he'd run as a more consistent conservative rather than a "compassionate" conservative, and left off the pandering, he might well have won by larger margins, and actually won the popular vote in 2000.
I wrote up W’s visit to our little town here in NH on this site in July 1999.
I wish I had saved it. It was severe criticism based on his presentation and his speech, and my last line was “he is our Clinton”.
He was in no respect a conservative.