Why is ronald reagan important

Higher revenues would then be used to increase defense spending and balance the federal budget. Bush once called it, "voodoo economics. At the same time, he insisted on, and for the most part, was successful in gaining increased funding for defense. Although inflation dropped from The administration modified its economic policy after two years by proposing selected tax increases and budget cuts to control rising deficits and higher interest rates.

As Reagan left office, the nation was experiencing its sixth consecutive year of economic prosperity. The economic gains, however, came at a cost of a record annual deficit and a ballooning national debt. The budget deficit was exacerbated by a trade deficit. Americans continued to buy more foreign-made goods than they were selling. He also signed, reluctantly, trade legislation designed to open foreign markets to U.

Reagan's domestic policies had a major impact on the American people and have had for many years. He followed up the passage of the largest tax cut in U. Reagan led the battle for a Social Security reform bill designed to ensure the long-term solvency of the system, and oversaw the passage of immigration reform legislation, as well as the expansion of the Medicare program to protect the elderly and disabled against "catastrophic" health costs.

Part of the New Right's basic beliefs was that "judicial activism" was un-Constitutional and judges should be selected by an adherence to "judicial restraint. Reagan consistently received very high approval ratings. He was not popular with some minority groups, particularly African-Americans, many of whom did not benefit from the economic prosperity.

In foreign policy he initiated a massive rearmament program to contain Soviet imperialism and expounded America's democratic faith without shame. In doing so he broke, without fully dispelling, the debilitating grip of the "post-Vietnam syndrome" and the mentality of "blame America first. Perhaps equally significant is the fact that during the Reagan years principled, articulate conservatives gained unprecedented access to executive power and to the nation's policy-making elite.

The Reagan Revolution of was not a conventional shift in legislative priorities and personnel; it was an intellectual challenge that undermined the sanctity of the status quo. It did not overthrow that status quo; Reagan never had the votes-or perhaps the intent-to do so.

But his administration for at least a time altered the terms of public debate and tarnished the intellectual pretensions of social democracy. In these subtle but influential ways Reagan altered American politics more than he did public policy. Contemplating this substantial legacy, I am nonetheless struck by how tentative and contingent it remains.

Is the economic boom of the s, for example, a healthy phenomenon for which Reaganomics may take credit, or is it as critics maintain a false prosperity built upon the quicksands of debt?

Events during the next few years will tell-and will thereby color our judgment of the Reagan record. Similarly, was the revival of American military strength and morale in the early '80s a lasting achievement or only a fleeting spasm in a dreary saga of declension?

Here, as well, the post-Reagan era will inform us. So, too, for the Supreme Court; all that Reagan has done to reshape it could quickly be undone in the next presidential term. And despite the entry of conservatives into the Washington mainstream, the Reagan Revolution is not yet institutionalized. To a considerable degree, then, Reagan's place in history will depend upon the deeds of his successor. To those who grumble that he has not reconstituted the political economy of Herbert Spencer, one can only say welcome to politics and welcome to America.

If all this creates uncertainty about our 40th president's eventual niche in the history books, another factor is likely to embroil him in extended controversy. For Ronald Reagan, like Woodrow Wilson and Abraham Lincoln before him, has been guided in office by a compelling moral vision. Because he has been a principled and not merely managerial chief executive, Reagan has profoundly antagonized those who espouse competing social visions-notably the New Deal, Great Society, and New Left.

He has threatened their intellectual hegemony and sense of superiority, much as FDR threatened those Republicans of his day who considered themselves America's natural aristocracy. As custodians of a regime under powerful ideological assault, Reagan's adversaries have a vested interest in disparaging his presidency. For this reason alone, his standing at the bar of history will long engender passion.

Such is the fate of those who delegitimate but do not overturn the status quo. How, then, will Ronald Reagan go down in history? As a conservative Roosevelt who redirected America's course for half a century? As a second Coolidge of liberal caricature who fiddled while the economy burned? As a benign, Ike-like grandfather who ruled for an insignificant interlude during America's inexorable march toward socialism? As a rejected prophet like Wilson whose vision triumphed only after his death?

My own hunch is that an Eisenhower analogy may be the closest one-although not the analogy dear to yesterday's liberals. A generation ago, when Eisenhower left office, he was widely disdained by "the best and the brightest" as an aging golfer whose presidency had brought little but stagnation. It was time, his youthful successor asserted, to "get America moving again. Only now, a generation later, have historians begun to perceive Eisenhower as an effective, "hidden-hand" executive who governed during what in retrospect appears an Augustan age.

One can't help wondering how much more he could have achieved had he been a more forceful, involved chief executive. Will historians someday gaze similarly on our own decade and its dominant public figure? No one can say. But I do venture to predict that our 40th president will be adjudged a singular statesman, and for a reason few of his critics understand. As the finest political orator of our era, Ronald Reagan reaffirmed with eloquence the continuing validity and vitality of the American Dream.

It has been Ronald Reagan's extraordinary political gift to be at once a unifier and a constructive polarizer. Polls have registered his ability to make a substantial majority of Americans feel better about both themselves and their country. At the same time, he is no Eisenhower, bringing people together behind a genial moderation.

Genial, yes; moderate, not really at all. During the s, conservatives hissed Franklin Roosevelt at the newsreels while liberals looked on him with something akin to worship. Fifty years later, Reagan has reversed those patterns of appraisal. Those who question Reagan's conservatism or wonder whether he has made a genuine difference lack a sense of historical perspective.

He has accomplished nothing less than a fundamental change in the terms of debate of American politics. The Democrats, it is true, presently show signs of revival-no political mood lasts foreverbut they have achieved recovery only by carefully distancing themselves from the liberalism that is their presumed reason for being.

They have been reduced to responding to the president's agenda rather than setting their own. Consider Reagan's accomplishments. He has restored the American economy a president's single most important domestic responsibility even as he has frustrated the Left's ambition to transform the welfare state into the redistributive state.

More generally, he has revitalized faith in private enterprise, the work ethic, political freedom, and the dignity and responsibility of the individual; he has, in short, reestablished a consensus on the basic principles of democratic capitalism that define the American experiment.

On all the major social issues-abortion, quotas, gay rights, feminism, crime and punishment, the family, moral and religious values-the Reagan administration has been conservative and correct, even if reasonable people might quarrel over details of policy and political strategy. In foreign affairs, the record is mixed, but it should not be forgotten that Reagan has kept the peace, rebuilt America's defenses, and exhibited, at least on occasion, a vigorous understanding of the national interest no imaginable Democratic administration would have undertaken the Grenada operation.

He has labeled the USSR for what it has been, an evil empire, at the same time that he has understood the need to establish sober terms of coexistence with it. His essential skepticism toward the Soviets has not blinded him to the possibility that in Mikhail Gorbachev we may be dealing with a genuine departure in Soviet leadership. Reagan's leadership was, above all, a triumph of personality. His eloquence, charm, courage recall his behavior after the assassination attempt , and remarkable sense of self revived Americans' pride in the presidential office and, by extension, in the nation itself.

No president in memory has displayed so healthy an ego, and Reagan's most adamant political opponents concede his fundamental personal decency. There was, it must be said, a considerable falling off since The administration has failed in Nicaragua though that was by no means entirely its own doing and faltered in Panama.

The greatest domestic disappointment came in the defeat of the Bork nomination, where the administration stumbled tactically and failed to communicate adequately the essential principle at issue. Americans must somehow be made to understand the necessity of judicial restraint to the preservation of our constitutional order. Still, except for those on the irreconcilable Right who dream of an American equivalent of the Bourbon restoration dismantlement of the welfare state and reversion of Cold War attitudes to those prevailing circa , Reagan's has been a record that conservatives can look to with no small feeling of approval and satisfaction.

To those who grumble that he has not been everywhere successful and has not reconstituted the political economy of Herbert Spencer, one can only say welcome to politics and welcome to America. A great president?

Reagan was given a state funeral in Washington, D. Nancy Reagan died of heart failure in at age 94 and was buried alongside her husband. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.

Nancy Reagan was an American first lady , the wife of Ronald Reagan, 40th president of the United States, and actress, noted for her efforts to discourage drug use by American youths. On the second day of the highly contested Republican National Convention, it was still far from clear which candidate the party delegates intended to choose: sitting president Gerald Ford or his challenger, former actor and California governor Ronald Reagan.

Amidst this Elected in as the 35th president of the United States, year-old John F. Kennedy became one of the youngest U. Harry S. Truman , the 33rd U. In the White House from to , Truman made the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan, helped rebuild postwar Europe, worked to Abraham Lincoln, a self-taught lawyer, legislator and vocal opponent of slavery, was elected 16th president of the United States in November , shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War.

Lincoln proved to be a shrewd military strategist and a savvy leader: His Emancipation Thomas Jefferson , author of the Declaration of Independence and the third U. Similarly, the record eight shutdowns that On March 30, , John Hinckley Jr. The effects are still felt today. According to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, his favorite flavor was licorice. Reagan started eating jelly beans in as he was trying to quit a pipe-smoking habit. He switched to Jelly Bellies a decade later.

This is according to the Reagan Library website. The name came from his childhood haircut, among other things. However, The Killers was considered too violent for TV, and released to movie theaters instead.