Why don't liberals love Bush?

I've never quite understood the absolute total liberal hatred of President Bush.

Yeah, the war is a big one, but for the most part Bush has governed as a liberal.

Here's a piece that acknowledges such....

As Texas governor, he had brought in bipartisan reforms that called for standardized testing and increased accountability — as well as funding — for schools. He wanted to bring in the same approach nationwide. The result was No Child Left Behind, a bipartisan bill that vastly expanded Washington's control and spending over education. "You've got one of the most conservative presidents in U.S. history teaming up with Ted Kennedy to create one of the most micromanaged and centralized education policies we've ever seen," says Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

Part of the deal Bush struck with Democratic allies in Congress was that they would ignore the objections of teachers' unions and go along with his aggressive accountability package if the President would raise education spending dramatically. The No Child policy set a target date of 2014 by which all students are expected to be "proficient" in reading and math on standardized tests designed by each state. Every school was given benchmarks for yearly improvement. Schools that do not make "adequate yearly progress" are placed on probation and can eventually have their staffs replaced or be turned into charter schools.

Despite shaping a Supreme Court with justices who want to erase race-conscious government policies such as affirmative action, Bush also agreed to track the educational performance of black and Latino students in an unprecedented manner. If any of those subgroups failed to reach targets, the entire school would be penalized.

Although Democrats complain Bush didn't spend enough, he more than doubled federal funding for poor schools. The result has been improvements on national tests overall, and a slight closing of the achievement gap between racial groups. The policy has faced blowback from teachers' unions, who are unhappy with schools being judged to be failing, and concerned about pervasive "teaching to the test" and an emphasis on math and reading to the exclusion of other subjects. But Bush succeeded in keeping education at the top of the national agenda, and legitimized the notion of tracking all children's progress in a way that will be difficult to abandon after his presidency. "Very few people want to return to the Neanderthal period that existed before strong accountability policy, to hyper-decentralization where local school boards in, say, Georgia could ignore the performance of black kids," say Fuller.