I really like George Bush personally, I liked his faith and I liked Dick Cheney and Rumsfield and their handling of national security in the year after 9-11.
But at the end of the day, his SEC chair Christopher Cox looked the other way in enforcing certain banking rules against leverage so that firms like Lehman Brothers (now bankrupt) could leverage their assets 40 to 1 versus the normal 10 or 12 to 1. And Bush let Alan Greenspan inflate the asset bubble with low interest rates which sort of helped lead to the 2008 crash.
And on immigration, he had too many big buddies in the construction industry in Texas that liked cheap illegal migrant labor, so there too he pretty much let open borders run wild. The only difference between Bush and Obama is that Obama openly encourages them to migrate here.
I don’t have any malice towards Bush, but he just did a bad job running the country in a conservative and effective way. He let Wall Street and big business run roughshod over things and thus helped usher in the even more destructive Obama era.
My thoughts on Bush-43 parallel yours. Very nice person, good on national security, bad on economic and fiscal policies.