I think Reagan was the worst president in a century. His administration was a time of great opportunity due to the end of the cold war (which I think should be credited entirely to Mikhail Gorbachev's good sense about the foolishness of the cold war, not Reagan's insane arms spending and saber-rattling). That opportunity was squandered because America's ruling class decided to vindicate all the worst criticisms ever made about capitalists' viciousness and greed: Gone was the paterrnalistic Fortune 500 employer of J. K. Galbaith's postwar New Industrial State, thowing workers bouquets of (relatively) secure employment, limited working hours, low-cost healthcare insurance and defined-benefit pensions; in its place was a "winner-take-all" society of exalted plutocratic entrepreneurs and speculators, attended by an ever more lowly workforce possessing shrinking job opportunities, compensation and benefits. With the distant threat of the USSR gone as a competing economic model -- an example, however parodistic and perverted, that a viable socialist state was possible -- the US establishment, under Emcee-in-Chief Ronald Reagan, did everything possible to reconstitue the bare-knuckled screw-the-workers capitalism of the 19th century. I am amazed every day at the extent to which they have succeeded.
Carl