This was not mere posturing. Compassionate conservatism was put into action. The Bush administration achieved its most notable domestic victories in Congress -- from the tax cuts to No Child Left Behind, the prescription drug benefits for seniors, support for faith-based organizations, and its expansion of the national security apparatus -- with substantial Democratic support, and all save the tax cuts expanded government influence. As Fred Barnes noted in 2003, Bush was forming what Irving Kristol called “the conservative welfare state.”...The conservative ends justified the liberal means.

Still, members of the liberal intelligentsia believed Bush’s governing philosophy is that “the government can have no positive role in its citizen’s [sic] lives.” Deficits were seen not as evidence to the contrary, but as part of a plan “to rid social programs of their funding.” It is difficult to overstate the profundity of the misunderstanding when George Lakoff writes that Bush represents the quintessentially conservative commitment “to get rid of protective agencies and social programs” and establish a government “limited to security and maintaining a free market.”"...

p. 4, "The result was government growth and deficit spending even as the country was cutting taxes and prosecuting two wars. Whether this approach was right or wrong, however, it is completely and demonstrably false that “nobody was angry about the deficit under President Bush.” Bush’s big government did arouse substantial opposition within conservative ranks.

Liberal politicians and their fellow travelers in the media seemed to assume that Americans disapproved of Bush for the same reasons they did. Yet many rejected Bush because he was not their kind of conservative (or, they might say, no conservative at all). 

William F. Buckley was tactful in 2006 when he said that Bush suffers fromthe absence of effective conservative ideology--with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending.” 

And George Will wrote in 2004 that “Republicans are swiftly forfeiting the perception that they are especially responsible stewards of government finances....

These are hardly figures on the fringe, and they object to Bush’s government growth and deficit spending. Another example from the same year is Richard Viguerie, a pioneer of conservative strategy, whose (Aug. 2006) Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big-Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause, is a clear precursor to the Tea Party movement.

Yet the rejection of big-government conservatism, amongst libertarians, reaches further back. A Cato Institute article from 2003 calls Bushthe most gratuitous big spender to occupy the White House since Jimmy Carter.It was not possible to blame this on the wars alone, since non-defense discretionary spending had increased by even more (20.8%) than total spending (15.6%). 

“Government agencies that Republicans were calling to be abolished less than 10 years ago, such as education and labor, have enjoyed jaw-dropping spending increases under Bush of 70 and 65 percent respectively.” While some expenditures are matters of political expediency, this only means that Bush “spends like Carter and panders like Clinton.” The chairman of Cato even hoped for a divided government, and Doug Bandow at The American Conservative lamented (in Dec. 2003) the Republican majority that was “promoting larger government at almost every turn.”"...