What are your opinions of Ronald Regan as president?

Question

My college teacher has a pretty severe liberal bias and he makes Regan out to be this bad guy. I wasnt alive while he was president, so i dont know if what hes saying is accurate or what, i always assumed people liked him.

Answer 1

Most liberal guys did not appreciate the fact that President Regan converted from a liberal president of the Screen Actors Guild to a hard nosed Republican governor of California.. After California, to make matters worse, he ran for president and was elected handily. His economic policies infuriated the liberals but proved to be a boost for American business and industry. He was also instrumental in eliminating the cold war with the USSR. His efforts tore down the wall which separated East and West Berlin resulting in free trade within the city. which also reduced tensions so that emphasis could be focused on economis matters.Perhaps your college professor closed his mind to achievements since the Liberals can point to none ot theirs.Probably, your professor never toiled as us commoners did so liberal thoughts from other liberal professors is all he knows.

Answer 2

It could be that your teacher was in school or already teaching in the 80s. I have been working in Higher ed since the seventies and I've never liked Reagan. The policy established in the Reagan administration was to reduce funding to education. This may have been the first time I noticed it, or perhaps it was just that it was more drastic. This policy is continuing, under the guise of increasing funding. The rhetoric about this kind of thing starts about 11 or 12 months before an election and is forgotten immediately afterward.

There was a general cut in funding for social programs. At that time, it meant that a number of people who had been institutionalized, at government expense, for psychological disorders, were released from the hospitals because there was no where to put them. Many of these people ended up on the streets. Naturally, having spent so long being taken their medications, or being taken to the dispensary for their medication, some couldn't get into the habit of going to the clinic to get their meds.

Although the story is that Human Immunovirus arrived in the US during the Bicentennial celebration in 1976, by the early 1980s AIDS was becoming an epidemic. Except that our President claimed there was no such disease. He finally admitted it later, after there were a number of stories in the papers and on TV with first Mrs. Bush holding an AIDS Baby and later Mrs. Reagan doing something like it.. Perhaps the ladies wised him up.

He continually fought the Brady Bill. This was the gun control measure named for Jim Brady, the Press Secretary from Centralia Illinois who was paralyzed in the attack on President Reagan because he put himself between the shooter and the President.

His attitude toward the Russians seemed to border on insanity. He let things slip in like the accidental declaration that we were going to start bombing the Soviet Union at the beginning of his radio address. Oh, for a seven second delay that Saturday afternoon.
The posturing over the KAL 007 incident came very close to a war with the Soviets. They had indeed shot down a civilian airliner in their air space, but the rhetoric coming from the White House had most of us trying to figure out how far we were from a strategic target.

He was the Great Communicator, to be sure, when he spoke it was all charm. Still, some of the time, I kept comparing him to Eddie Haskell on Leave it to Beaver.

Answer 3

I was in high school when Ronald Reagan was president. He was awful. Look at the pop culture of the time and that will tell you what it was like - songs like "Born in the USA" and "Allentown" were all about how people were losing jobs right and left. Manufacturing jobs, which used to pay like $60,000.00 per year, were shipped overseas. Two factories near me were shut down and most of the men in my neighborhood lost their jobs. Places like Flint Michigan were economically devastated. Bankruptcies skyrocketed. Yet the rich continued to make more money and spend it frivolously, while the poor got poorer. It can be summed up by the movie "Wall Street" and Gordon Gecko's famous quote "Greed is good". That was the US under Reagan. Still, he was very charismatic and popular. People called him the Teflon president, because no matter what happened, nothing ever stuck to him. There was the arms for hostages deal, supporting the Contras in Nicaragua in a fight against their legitimate government and supplying arms to the Afghans and Iraqis, which were later used against us, among other things.

And most people who aren't republicans credit people like Pope John Paul, Mikhail Gorbachev and Lech Walesa and the Solidarity party with ending the Cold War

Answer 4

Ronald Reagan was President during a wonderful time in the US, when jobs were more plentiful and things a little more peaceful. He didn't have some of the issues that are having to be dealt with today.

Answer 5

People not only liked Regan they loved him. He won his second term for president easily. He will go down as one of the greatest Presidents of all time. A liberal would hate that he cut taxes and cut government programs. He did end the cold war, which made this planet a safer place to live.

Answer 6

Ronald Regan was a mediocre president. He wasn't bad, but he wasn't anywhere near the genius that some people think he was. He was a freakin' actor.

Answer 7

I dont know wasnt alive either, but I read on an respectable website he was quite popular and got the USA through the Cold War and and economic depression. My mom is a republican and says he was great so I needed to find out for myself.

Answer 8

Reagan promised to lower taxes, so he financed his huge military buildup on borrowed money, creating an enormous national debt that you young taxpayers (and us older ones) are still paying. If you have any elders in nursing homes, then you know that nursing homes can seize and sell the assets of patients to pay for their care. This you can thank RR for. RR talked about how great military vets were but cut their benefits wherever he could get away with it. RR conducted an illegal war in Nicaragua, selling weapons to our enemy Iran in return for secret funds to fund the contras. RR invaded British territory (the island of Grenada) without giving any notice to our best ally that he was about to do so, all to defeat a small band of communists. RR mocked enviromentalists and said that trees create more pollution than industry. He was elected twice with the powerful support of wealthy libertarians, who liked his rhetoric about small government, but he betrayed them by vastly increasing the power of the DEA. RR claimed that he would restore morality to government - sure he did - he financed the terrible repression in El Salvador and Guatemala in which thousands of Indians were tortured and killed for trying to do things like join a labor union.
To those of us who hated him, RR was a nuclear hawk, a man of feeble intellect, and a man of very shallow mind. He looked like a puppet to us in the hands of people like George Bush, his much more intelligent veep, former head of the CIA.