DALLAS - Despite the cheers last night for President Bush at the GOP convention, he's ending his final term as one of the most unpopular presidents in history.

It's a puzzling and ironic turn from eight years ago, when he left Texas as a successful and very popular governor.

In his first speech as president elect, George W. Bush spoke in the Democratically-controlled Texas House of Representatives for a reason - bipartisanship had been good for him.

"When he went to Washington, George Bush was in the polls the most popular governor we have every had," said Wayne Slater, a Dallas Morning News political writer.

With Democrats, Bush cut property taxes, granted teachers a pay raise, passed juvenile justice reform and parental notification before a minor could get an abortion.

Wayne Slater - a political writer and co-author of two books on Bush - says Bush to build a record for a White House run had no choice.

"He understood that a bipartisan approach was the only way to accomplish things," he said.

Some powerful Democrats, like Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, responded wanting to work with Bush.

Austin columnist Dave McNeely co-wrote a biography on Bullock.

"He'd been the president of the Texas Rangers, he could talk baseball, he was just kind of a popular guy," he said.

But more than popularity worked for Bush.

"And what was good for George Bush was that Democrats in Texas are like Republicans somewhere else. They are fairly moderately conservative," said Slater.

Bush arrived in Washington, though, finding it a lot different than Austin.

"Washington was not Texas and Democrats in Washington were not ready to work with George Bush, as key Democrats here like Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, were," Slater added.

"He had the likes of people, like Tom DeLay and Phil Gramm in Washington, and they'd been around for a while and they were going to run things the way they wanted to run them, not the way he wanted them to run them," said McNeely.

Bush got the big tax cuts and education bills he wanted but then 9/11 happened.

Bush became a war president pursuing terrorists, shifting his focus to overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

"He relied increasingly on this a circle of folks of advisers in the bubble of the White House and the result was some of those people, Dick Cheney I believe, Don Rumsfeld, and others gave him some very bad advice," said Slater.

By 2005, the war in Iraq dragged on.

Then hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf coast.

Bush, the compassionate conservative, was harshly criticized for appearing detached from the suffering as the federal government fumbled the response.

Bush's second term agenda went nowhere. The Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress in 2006 and the economy slipped.

In his final year, polls show just a third of Americans approve how Bush is performing.

"And so the Bush years will be seen as really the opposite of what happened in Texas where he helped build the Republican Party," Slater said.

E-mail bwatson@wfaa.com.