Rise to Fame
Beating Ann Richards in the 1994 Texas governor's race was the first real sign he wasn't just trading on his father's name. Richards was popular, had mocked him publicly, and was the heavy favorite. He won anyway, running on four focused issues: education, juvenile justice, tort reform, welfare. Re-election in 1998 came with 69% of the vote. The 2000 presidential race ended with the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore halting the Florida recount, giving him the electoral college 271-266 while he lost the popular vote. That disputed entry set the temperature for everything that came after.
In the Spotlight
The arc ran from 92% approval after 9/11 down to somewhere near the bottom of modern presidential rankings. Iraq, Katrina, and the 2008 financial collapse happened on his watch. No amount of revisionism fully absorbs all three. What he has quietly managed is a partial image reset in the Trump years, when 'at least he was a normal Republican' became a comparative compliment. YouGov now ranks him among the most popular living Republicans, which would have been unthinkable in 2009. The bar moved. He didn't.
Side Notes
The folksy Texas persona was a Yale degree and a Harvard MBA in a Stetson. Born in New Haven to a family that had been in Republican politics for a generation, he relocated to Texas as a child and spent decades perfecting the brush-clearing rancher image. The painting hobby emerged post-presidency, after reading a Winston Churchill essay on art as pastime, and he took it seriously enough to publish two books of portraits and fill gallery walls. Churchill he is not. But it's a stranger resume than the cowboy act suggested.