To your credit, pbrower, a President Voinovich sounds amazing
Certain aspects of history are undeniable. One is that George W. Bush was objectively the least-suited people to have ever become President in at least a century*, and that he had one of the most troubled Presidencies ever. It is not that he was so much more conservative; it was that he was basically the new Warren G. Harding. Dubya created his own problems.
As for Voinovich, he had been Governor of Cleveland, Governor of Ohio, and a US Senator. Can anyone imagine a more impressive
curriculum vitae for President of the United States? If anyone was ever prepared to be President without being severely past-prime**, there he was.
My critique of Dubya goes beyond partisan sniping. Even if I am a very partisan Democrat I cannot simply say "liberal good; conservative bad". I have the obligation to the extent that I fancy myself an amateur historian that some conservative Republican -- yea many other conservative Republicans of the time -- would have been far better than Dubya.
9/11 could have been stopped by disrupting the network in place, active inside America, in 2001. A wave of arrests would have done the trick. If I had been President I would have hit the roof upon connecting al-Qaeda interest in commercial jetliners and its MO of transforming heavy equipment (previously vehicles and boats) into explosive devices. (I would have likely misinterpreted the danger as one of al-Qaeda loading jetliners with explosives and detonating them where they would do the most damage, but the defense against that would be similar -- keep al-Qaeda away from jetliners). I might not have seen a commercial jetliner as a missile itself unless I had the luck to ask the real experts in the Armed Forces...
Dubya was afraid to insult Arab leaders. Tough. al-Qaeda was about as much an expression of Islam as the KKK is an expression of Christianity.
Economics? Republicans would have been wise to push the old conservative virtues of thrift, enterprise, deferred gratification, self-reliance, and probity that worked in the past to foster economic growth. Paradoxically Democrats may end up with that by default as Republicans taking their economic values from the Double-Zero Decade. Instead Dubya pushed a speculative boom that went catastrophically wrong.
For all the Republicans who think President Obama a disaster -- Dubya made him possible.
*The non-entities of the late 19th century between Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt operated in a far-simpler world with far fewer dangers.
** the rap on James Buchanan.
