Certainly Not In The Burkean Sense
Mark Schmitt: “Bush is not conservative in the least, certainly not in the Burkean sense in which conservative means respecting a pre-existing order and our duty to future generations, or even in the vulgar sense of merely favoring a smaller government.”
My first-ever university-level essay argued that the conservatives of today (or, then in 1996) were indeed not conservative at all. Schmitt covers a lot of ground in the above, mostly arguing that, in a certain light, it's possible to see President Bush as a Nixon-liberal, and has some history to back it up.