There’s been talk that George W. Bush was so inept that he should trademark the phrase “Worst President Ever,” though some historians would bestow that title on pre-Civil War President James Buchanan. Still, a case could be made for putting Ronald Reagan in the competition.

Granted, the very idea of rating Reagan as one of the worst presidents ever will infuriate his many right-wing acolytes and offend Washington insiders who have made a cottage industry out of buying some protection from Republicans by lauding the 40th President.

But there’s a growing realization that the starting point for many of the catastrophes confronting the United States today can be traced to Reagan’s presidency. There’s also a grudging reassessment that the “failed” presidents of the 1970s – Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter – may deserve more credit for trying to grapple with the problems that now beset the country.

Originally posted by grover
I was never enamored with Reagan or his portrayal of a President.

He was great if you were a rich white male or wanted to be... and by playing off of the lower classes desire to be upper class... is how he got to the oval office.

He was the first partisan president as opposed to a national president... by that I mean that he was the first for whom someone could say depending on their political leanings that he's my president or he's not my president as opposed to our president regardless of party...

Strapping on my asbestos Undies. I'm going to get flamed. But So What.
The problem with that opinion is that some tend to forget who voted him in and then who reelected him.

Reagan Democrat is an American political term used by political analysts to denote traditionally Democratic voters, especially white working-class Northerners, who defected from their party to support Republican President Ronald Reagan in both the 1980 and 1984 elections. It is also used to refer to the smaller but still substantial number of Democrats who voted for George H. W. Bush in the 1988 election. The term can also be used to describe moderate Democrats who are more conservative than liberal on certain issues like national security and immigration.

The work of Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg is a classic study of Reagan Democrats. Greenberg analyzed white ethnic voters (largely unionized auto workers) in Macomb County, Michigan, just north of Detroit. The county voted 63 percent for John F. Kennedy in 1960, but 66 percent for Reagan in 1980. He concluded that "Reagan Democrats" no longer saw Democrats as champions of their working class aspirations, but instead saw them as working primarily for the benefit of others: the very poor, the unemployed, African Americans, and other groups. In addition, Reagan Democrats enjoyed gains during the period of economic prosperity that coincided with the Reagan administration following the "malaise" of the Carter administration. They also supported Reagan's strong stance on national security and opposed the 1980s Democratic Party on such issues as pornography, crime, and taxes.[1]

As far as I am concerned Reagan's biggest fault is that he really had no serious grasp on the issues that confronted him. He was hired to portray a president which he did faultlessly but all the strings were being pulled by the men behind the curtain...

Soviet Union? Who? What? When? Oh yeah Never more!

I say what good is a balanced budget if we all went up in a Nuclear Holocaust.