I still can’t understand why so many Americans think that Ronald Reagan was a great President. A recent Harris poll indicates that Reagan is considered by 25% of Americans as the best President since 1940, beating FDR (at 19%) and Kennedy (at 15%). A 2012 survey by Nate Silver of 4 presidential scholar polls found Reagan to be the 10th greatest Prez, just behind JFK (and ahead of Lyndon Johnson, at #12).

I lived through the Reagan years, and to be honest, I think that the Gipper is one of the most overrated leaders of all time. Actually, he was one of the luckiest. The economy started in slump when he was first elected in 1980, but then achieved significant growth levels for the balance of his two terms. People still attribute this to his tax cuts and “Reaganomics”, but actually, oil and energy prices dropped significantly during this time (due to technical factors on the world level and not due to anything Reagan did or didn’t do), and inflation was tamed by the initially painful restraint on money supply growth by Fed Chairman Paul Volcker (who, remember, was appointed by President Jimmy Carter).

The US’s major enemy for the past 50 years, the Soviet Union, had also lost its strength and began its collapse by the end of Reagan’s term. Part of this could be attributed to its overspending on defense, goaded by Reagan’s military build-up and his committing the US to a mostly fruitless program to develop a high-tech “Star Wars” defense against ballistic missiles. But in reality, the USSR had been collapsing of its own internal inefficiencies and corruptions for over a decade by the time that Reagan left office in 1989. It was more a function of Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to liberalize and humanize the Communist regime that brought its ultimate contradictions into the light and undermined the balance of terror that kept it going.

I have to agree with Slate-founder Michael Kinsley that the Reagan mystique needs some de-mystifying. Until 1980, Ronald Reagan was known mostly for being a grade B movie actor. You had to really be bored to be caught on a Saturday afternoon watching an old film with Reagan in it (or be up at 2 am, perhaps). I only remember Reagan for his stint as the TV host of GE Theater. But in the 1980’s, Reagan showed just what a masterful actor he really was. He really did convince a majority of Americans that he was the wise and powerful commander-in-chief of the greatest nation on earth. A fellow blogger named Tim Sexton summed Reagan up quite well:

It may be the ultimate political irony in American history that much of Ronald Reagan’s success as a President was acting as if everything was going along just fine, and that the only thing in the world Americans had to fear was communist aggression . . . in fact, many Americans had to fear more from Reagan’s economic policies than anything the Soviet Union ever did. The irony, of course, is that [in Hollywood, as opposed to the White House,] Ronald Reagan never was considered a particularly great talent.

[But then again, sometimes delusion is required in social affairs so as to unleash positive energy; positive delusions sometimes become self-fulfilling. Reagan did make the country feel good about itself, and admittedly there were good effects from that. Barack Obama seems to me a much more capable decision maker than Reagan, but he also seems to be a depressant upon the American spirit; and the initial failings and computer glitches of Obamacare certainly aren’t helping matters. A depressed nation, like a depressed individual, is usually not capable of great things. For all the Gipper’s many sins, he was definitely not depressing, other than to the Democrats who couldn’t get a political leg up on him.]