1. He did essentially nothing conservative on social issues. As I recall, he was very tolerant of homosexuality, and invited homosexual couples to sleep over at the White House. As governor of California he led the nation in making divorce easy. While claiming to be a born-again Christian, my recollection is that he rarely went to church. His wife was a shallow woman who accepted gifts of expensive dresses and consulted astrologers.

2. He was an admirer of Franklin Roosevelt and did little directly to reduce the size of the federal government-- though indirectly, his tax cuts (the easier route) helped quite a bit. The Department of Education survived; Medicare and Social Security didn't get serious reform attempts.

3. He did little for the Republican party and other conservatives. While rolling up a massive and inevitable victory in 1984, he did little to help any other Republicans win. Gerald Ford probably would have won the 1976 race if it hadn't been for Reagan's challenge and then his lack of help after losing the primaries. By the time George Bush became president, Congress had become far more liberal than eight years before-- in large part because conservative southern Democrats had been replaced by liberal ones.

4. He left the savings and loan crisis for his successor to deal with.

5. He skedaddled out of Lebanon after the Marines were blown up, and didn't punish anyone in the military for incompetence.

6. I can't think of a single thing he did that wasn't intended to help him politically, as opposed to using up political capital to achieve some worthy end. That is not to say that he did not do good things, but he chose to do only good things that would help him politically. (Perhaps the Treasury I tax reform plan is an exception, but that was a relatively low-level plan that was set up so even the Secretary of the Treasury could repudiate it as just a fantasy draft document written by visionary staffers. Other political damage was unintended-- Iran-Contra and the Bork nomination, for example.)

7. He appointed O'Connor and Kennedy to the Supreme Court. He also appointed Scalia, but one in three is not an impressive percentage of success.

Reagan did many good things, too, slowing the rate of growth of the government, restoring the military, and reversing our weak international position, but he could have done more.

It is important to keep in mind that Reagan's political position was stronger than that of either Gerald Ford or George Bush I, who had less support in Congress and the media. The liberal media thought Reagan stupid, but they did like his personality and he was treated more gently than either Ford or Bush.

This helped him to be able to do things such as call the Soviet Union "an evil empire". Saying that was true, would have been uncontroversial rhetoric 20 years before, and voters likes to hear him say it. The reason other politicians would not say it is that State Department types for some reason do not like blunt truths, and words like "evil" scare the post 1970 media and Establishment, which is liberal and relativist. But Ron and Nancy socialized with Hollywood people of less modern views, and the media considered him a grandpa of limited intellect who should not be criticized too harshly for saying such quaint things. George Bush I, on the other hand was considered a traitor to his class, a smart Yalie who ought to know better than to do anything conservative and who therefore must be a hypocrite willing to do anything for power. George Bush II is held to be stupid, like Reagan, but he is too young to be thought quaint, he is a Yale man, he seems disdainful of liberals rather than merely oblivious to them, he is genuinely pious, and he actually does take political risks.