The candidate, running for governor, was as crisp in his answers as the suit he was wearing.

“I’m hear to talk about Texas,” the candidate said directly, waving off questions relating to national Republican Party politics.

And, so methodically, the candidate went through his three big issues - staying on message as he plowed through taxes, education and criminal justice - and did as he promised. Looking at the candidate across the table along with other editors at The Monitor in McAllen, I thought, “The guy reallly looks like his Dad.”

Afterwards, one of my fellow editors said, “I wasn’t impressed. I don’t think he has a chance to beat Ann Richards.

“I think,” offering another viewpoint, “she better run a good campaign or she could be in trouble.”

Ann Richards would go on to run a half-hearted re-election campaign for governor. George W. Bush, as it turned out, cleaned her clock. The rest is, well, you know how things have turned out since 1994 when it comes to George W. Bush.

I sometimes think back to that  George W. Bush and wonder, “What happened to that guy?”

In the 1990s, with Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock as his mentor, Gov. Bush was bipartisan W., as he cobbled together Republicans and Democrats to get what he wanted for the most part. There were some notable failures, most especially a major tax reform bill Bush wanted but that ended up crashing in his first term. Still, as a Texan’s Texan sort of governor, Bush was in his element.

Bush liked to pretend he could speak a little Spanish, but he really couldn’t, (still can’t), but that didn’t stop him from yukking it up during his many jaunts to South Texas, with his good buddy Tony Garza of Brownsville often riding shotgun. Bush and Garza were real buds back then. During my editor days at The Monitor, they would stride in together, usually in their cowboy boots, and sit down to yak about whatever issue the governor was pushing at the time.

I can’t recall one time where Bush seemed tongue tied or mangled words badly. There was no “strategry,” a word coined by comedian Will Farrell years later in his savage imitiation of George W. Bush, the presidential candidate. Given his last name and relative success as a governor, it was inevitable that he would run for president. I could see the logic of it in 1999 as he geared up to run, but recall thinking, “Is he ready for what’s coming?”

All in all, one would have to say, no, George W. Bush wasn’t ready to be president, never was. I still like the guy, but honestly, he’s in over his head in the Oval Office. I wanted to believe he could do. I even voted for him in 2000 when he ran against Al Gore, much to the dismay of my die-hard Democratic Dad, who warned me.

“Bush is a right-winger,” my father said, shaking his head, when I pleaded that, no, really he was more of a moderate Republican.

My beloved Dad was right, and Bush would turn out to be a right-right president, not the center-right president I was sure he would be.

“I’m a uniter, not a divider.”

Remember that one? That was Bush’s mantra in his 2000 presidential campaign.

Yea, right.

I guess I didn’t see Karl Rove coming. Acting as the all-consuming political strategist for Bush, Rove fashioned a 50 percent-plus 1battle plan to get W. elected and re-elected president. The point wasn’t to build a wide array of support for Bush, but rather a smaller but solid and loyal base of voters for W.

Rove didn’t want a better country. He just wanted his guy to win. Did Rove take over Bush’s brain, or was the guy wired like that all along? We may never know.

And so now Barack Obama comes along eight years after Bush told us he was a uniter. Like Bush, Barack, the president-elect, pledges that he will work with Republicans, maybe put some in his Cabinet, and will be the sort of pragmatic politician Bush rarely was as president. The current and future president met today, (Monday), for their first meeting since Obama prevailed over John McCain in last week’s election.

All Americans can hope for a smooth transition between two presidents and their administrations that will have little, if anything, in common. In an era when bad economic news comes to our collective doorstep nearly every day, we should all hope Obama is the uniter not the divider that Bush turned out to be.

Bush will head to his ranch in Central Texas, or wherever he will end up living, and I wonder if he will ever think back to those heady days as the Texas guv, when he could speak in complete sentences in public without the help of a speechwriter. Too bad he had a Rove, not a Bullock, with him in Washington.

- R.D. Cavazos

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