Smartest president this millennium.

@Longleggedlady Agreed. I also think he had social intelligence that helped end the Cold War.

@Longleggedlady He appointed smart advisors, but calling them "good" in any sense of the term could not be farther from the truth.

@trollslayer He was actually way better than people give him credit for but mainly because he created the correct structure below himself to make sure things that he actually knew very little about himself got done and he didn't have a huge ego trip either when he was president

@OggggO I am not really old enough to know much about him being in office but lots of the people that were around say he did lots of good and didn't go around causing trouble with other countries

@Longleggedlady A brief summary:

@Longleggedlady That is not quite accurate. He invaded Grenada in 1983. He provided arms to the Contras in Nicaragua even though Congress had passed a law to prohibit it. He was quite active in interfering in foreign nations.

Reagan was terrible on environmental issues. Carter had the US on a path to independence from oil by 1989 through the use of alternative energy. At the time, the US led the world in solar, wind, and hydropower technology. When Reagan took office, he threw that out in favor of drilling for more oil to help his wealthy buddies. The US lost the world lead in alternative energy technology and although we are much better now, we have never recovered.

Reagan also cut taxes and ran huge budget deficits that threw the nation into the biggest recession since the Great Depression. Unemployment went well above 10%. People think Carter was an out of control spender, but the fact is that Carter's largest budget deficit was smaller than Reagan's smallest. Reagan put us on the path we are still on where revenues are nowhere close to spending.

You can look it up.

@OggggO Some of those can be easily justified with reason as to why he did them, Iraq Saddam a you got oil B at the time you were having issue with Iran.
You could actually write one of those for virtually every president in one way or another and probably most politicians throughout history and pick specific points
Remember politics is a dirty game they tell the people one thing and do another behind your back

@windinhishair Like i said way to young and also not American but people seemed to like him the world is never going to be completely free for oil it might be able to reduce the amount but there are too many other factors and professions and industries that rely on oil coming out of the ground etc take oil out and you are going to put at least 50 other things out of the equation
Yes alternative energy is the way forward but it is not entirely clean no matter how you gather it in there is still issues with it that move dirt from point A to point B

What are we going to do with all the depleated Lithium Ion Batteries ??? Nasty Nasty Stuff

@Longleggedlady Some people liked him, but his was a very corrupt administration. Several dozen members were convicted of crimes including bribery, tax evasion, fraud, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, etc.

You are correct that alternative energy is not perfect, and that we will always need to produce small amounts of oil, but we lost several decades of the path to energy independence due to Reagan's presidency, not to mention millions of high paying jobs in the energy sector.

I traveled quite a bit for work throughout Europe during his presidency, and he was not well liked at all.

@Longleggedlady He was a purely evil human being who mzde it very clear only the wealthy and powerful mattered. A second-rate actor with good speech writers. Look at what he did, not what he said. The beginning of the end for this pitiful broken country.

@hunkalove check your facts, Reagan wrote his own speeches.

@windinhishair In reality you can I'd you look hard enough find things like this for every president/ politician all over the world I am not defending Reagan in anyway I do know about some of it. But I thought as everyone had missed him out I would throw his name in the hat for consideration?? Then see what happens.

@OggggO There really is not good or bad, right or wrong in the equation we are talking about politicians and politics here the fact they were smart is the important part.

@Longleggedlady Reagan wasn't mentioned because he wasn't president during this millennium. All presidents make gaffes. Some like George W. Bush and Biden are more prone to them than others. But Reagan's presidency was not a good one for the US, and he was not widely admired either in the US or globally.

@Longleggedlady There very much is, and Reagan did more damage to this country than can easily be summed up in a format like this. Being "smart" is only good if you put it to good ends, and his advisors put their intelligence to unambiguously evil ends. A short list of issues they worsened or outright caused:
the AIDS epidemic
Repealing the Fairness doctrine, leading to the rise of large scale right-wing populist disinformation
deinstitutionalization
the political rise of the evangelical conservatism
demonizing public healthcare
supply side economics

And those are just domestic ones I know off the top of my head. You'd have to talk to someone with more international knowledge to get a good list of all the terrorists he funded and armed, all the countries he destabilized, and the general global mess he created.

@OggggO Believing there are the concepts of GOOD and BAD / RIGHT or WRONG when it comes to Politics and Politicians is a BIG MISTAKE to MAKE. They all have their own agenda and what they are actually going to do that has nothing to do with what they promised to do when on the election trail.
The public may not like or agree with it, but once they are in office they pursue that agenda.
I am sure that if you really looked at each President you could come up with a list of things they did that was of little or no use to the country or actually damaged the country in some way and or destabilized another deliberately
Your Presidents are not alone in that respect either.
Your current one has pissed off a good few countries as well and has bad miscalculated a situation and entirely missed the agenda that is maybe not entirely in his Presidency but certainly in the near future blow up in America's face.

@Longleggedlady All Presidents do things that are good, and that are bad, and they all make mistakes. That does not make them EQUAL to each other. Trump's presidency was the worst in our history. George W. Bush and Reagan did not have good presidencies either, nor did Jimmy Carter. Biden is still President, so we can't fully judge his presidency until it is over.

@windinhishair I am not ready to rate Reagan as either good or bad. Yes, I am biased because his presidency predates my voting life when issues were less important to me. But I do recognize that he was personally liked by a lot of people who disagreed with his politics, got along with democrats, and may have been the right person at the right time in regards to the Cold War (he seemed to click with Gorbachev). Some of his economic policies I think set us in a negative direction that we are still feeling effects of - and to me that is the most negative thing about his presidency.

@trollslayer I lived through Reagan's presidency and was of voting age. Many people lost their jobs during the recession his economic policies created, including at the company I worked for. Fortunately, I was not one of them. Reagan was liked personally by most Republicans and many Democrats, but his policies did not enjoy wide acceptance. During his time in office, he was often referred to as an "amiable dunce". While that is probably too harsh, particularly given our post-2000 standards for presidents, it does give you an idea of how he was considered contemporaneously. You are correct about many of the policies pushing us in a negative direction that we still deal with today.

There was shock when Reagan was elected that the nation could elect an actor and someone who appeared so intellectually-challenged as president. The thought was that was as low as we could go and would never be repeated. Then George Bush was selected in 2000, and we had another low. People thought that would never happen again. Then we elected Trump in 2016, and for the third time, many people had the same thought. Who knows how much lower we will go in the future?

@windinhishair The most telling is GHW Bush saying "read my lips..." A little while later he realized that the legacy of Reagan's economy was failure, and there was little choice but to raise taxes. He had the guts to do so, and lost re-election as a result.

@trollslayer That's why I consider him a much better president than he gets credit for. I believe historians agree. He did what he needed to do, and his actions actually helped Clinton enjoy a budget surplus by the end of his presidency.

@windinhishair What's wild to me is that Reagan and W both had folksy "aw shucks" personas they projected, and were good at appearing to be relatable, pleasant people to be around. Trump doesn't even have that, being openly nasty, vicious, petty, and generally obnoxious, yet his supporters eat it up. They can't get enough of it. To me that paints a clear picture of some unpleasant ways our culture has changed.

@windinhishair Agreed. I think he set the ball rolling for the good times we had in the mid-late 1990s.

@OggggO It isn't a coincidence that more Republicans lie like Trump, cheat like Trump, use vitriol like Trump, hate like Trump, and aggressively work to end democracy now that Trump has been President. As Reagan used to say "a fish rots from the head down".

@windinhishair I do know but I was having some fun
I got people to shift the discussion to Reagan which was my objective
When he wasn't even as you correctly say a president in this millennium.
Guess what I do for a living