Furthermore, how could anyone who "hated gays" ever get elected President of the Screen Actors Guild- even back in the 60s.

The recent gutter swill movie, "The Reagans", tried to paint Reagan as a hater of gays and the creators were widely ridiculed for such absurdity. They could not provide any basis or evidence for ANY of their defamatory portrayals. It is simply a spurious and hateful claim.

To get back on the topic in general:

A lot of people forget the climate of the world in the 1980s. It was believed that Communism and the Soviet Union were permanent fixtures. The West's political strategy was known as "detente" (a term coined by Nixon and Kissinger) which was basically an effort to do nothing more than work to ease tensions between the superpowers and be on the lookout for opportunities to improve relations.

The fear of nuclear war and/or Soviet invasion was enormous. Most of our parents vividly remember frequent drilling in schools to prepare for a nuclear attack. They remember the mass construction of bomb shelters. They remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. They remember the building of the Berlin Wall.

Even when I was a kid we had periodic "bomb drills" whenever tensions between the USA and the USSR got elevated.

It had become totally accepted the the Soviet/Communistic threat would always exist and that we just had to learn to deal with it.

Ronald Reagan was the first leader of any significance to reject that idea. He rejected the thought that a system of such incredible oppression should be simply tolerated. He believed, deep in his heart, that any system based on such evil principles was rotten at its core- and therefore weak.

His greatest accomplishment is sharing this belief with not just the USA but with the entire free world, and making them believe in it too. He then turned that belief into reality by winning the Cold War, defeating communism, and toppling the Soviet Union.

Every presidential historian I have ever read or seen on television agrees that Presidents generally have 2 or 3 main goals for their presidency and that is truly all they can hope to accomplish. The day to day activities of the government are handled by the enormous bureaucracy. A President has to focus on BIG IDEAS and work to accomplish them.

Ronald Reagan's main goals were:

1) Bring down the Evil Empire (USSR) and crush communism.

2) Repair the USA economy by cutting taxes and letting people keep more of their money (the top marginal rate was 70% when he came into office).

Those are 2 ENORMOUSLY ambitious goals. Miraculously, he accomplished both of them.

I am sure that even Ronald Reagan wished he could have solved every single problem that plagued the USA during his 2 terms. But a President can only do so much, and the things he did accomplish were of enormous import.

Two of the biggest things he is blamed for not "solving" are HIV/AIDS and poverty. I find this to be incredibly absurd since NOBODY has ever solved these problems ANYWHERE.

As a species and a civilization, we score a big fat ZERO for number of virii cured. So why is there such an irrational expectation that we should suddenly be able to cure HIV?

As a species and a civilization, poverty has been a constant affliction.

These two perennial problems have one thing in common: When/if they are ever solved, they will be solved by science.

Some sort of miraculous scientific breakthrough (nanobots perhaps?) will ne needed to defeat virii. Another sort of scientific breakthrough (synthetic foods? teleportation?) will be required to defeat poverty. I do not think anything any politician does will ever be able to significantly impact either of those ills.