Bush has said it himself. Yet the comparison was facile. The governors may indeed have been less anti-government than their Washington counterparts. This is why they tend to target the estate tax, Medicare, or the Earned Income Tax Credit rather than, say, the military, highways, or the Coast Guard. And the sorts of functions that so irk the right exist almost entirely at the federal level.
State governments do little social insurance or progressive taxation.
So the fact that Republican governors have not assailed government hardly means they hold a philosophy different from Republican congressmen. It simply means they govern in an environment that is already more to their liking. This is particularly true in Texas. But that's largely because there wasn't much further to go. Texas already ranked near the bottom in funding for almost every kind of social service.