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Comment by lintiness | Hacker News Reader

"He's the best we've had in living memory."

uh, WOW. you must have a short memory because reagan, bush sr, and clinton were all superior in almost every way, and none will eat a terrible policy failure like the aca.

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You might be interested to read http://www.salon.com/2015/12/28/behind_the_ronald_reagan_myt...

not the least bit interested in partisan "journalism". i was alive then.

And what metrics are you basing your statements on?

This is an excerpt from a mass-market history/biography book by a renowned historian at UNC Chapel Hill (emeritus), a foremost scholar of FDR’s life and work. It’s not journalism per se (with or without scare quotes) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0195176162/

Somewhat surprisingly for a leftish Scot I am a fan of Reagan - for one very important reason. He understood that the standard US view of the Soviets was actually wrong and it was the Soviet leadership who were utterly afraid of the US (perhaps for good reasons) and he changed his approach.

It wasn’t widely realized at the time even at high levels of the US government, but the USSR collapsed under its own economic weight, and was in demographic free-fall before Reagan ever took office. It’s unlikely that any action the Reagan administration took had a significant effect on the end result, though arguably US policies might have accelerated or retarded the decline by a couple years.

The Soviet's might have been broke in the 1980s but they were armed to the teeth and I do think that the change from "evil empire" rhetoric to actually engaging with their new leadership probably reduced the risks of an all-out war which few of us would have survived - certainly not here in the UK.

Alright - so we are two people that have very different views of the past 50 years it sounds like.

So, in your perspective, what was something that made Bush Sr a superior president to Obama? Or any of the others you listed? Help me understand your perspective.

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