Beachwood Reporter takes a moment today to bash Reagan:

“People continue to be fascinated by Reagan,” the Trib’s Julia Keller writes. “There’s no explaining it - except, perhaps, by Richard Reeves, who writes of Reagan: ‘He knew how to be president.’ Such a simple but profound sentence.”

Really? He knew how to trade arms for hostages and mine Nicaraguan harbors and create an exploding and unprecedented deficit and preside over the death of American manufacturing and ignore AIDS and make fun of poor, homeless, and hungry people and blow up Marines in Lebanon and go to Bitburg and appoint indictable Cabinet officials and let his schedule be set by an astrologist?

Reminds me of the 1996 Democratic National Convention, when I was doing a lot of reporting for Newsweek and found myself at a dinner seated near then-national editor Jon Meacham, who is now the magazine’s editor. Meacham much preferred Reagan to Clinton, explaining that Reagan “just seemed like he was the president.”

Yes. That’s what public relations is good at - making things “seem.”

Just like some folks “seem” to be journalists.

Every President has their failures for sure. And I could go through and investigate the failures Reagan’s being accused of here. Some of them are likely to be considered failures only if you hold a certain set of views about the role of government. Since Reagan was honest about his views on that subject, one can hardly fault him for not succeeding.

The bigger issue, is that judging the greatness of Presidents is always a subjective mission, but experts generally focus on the successes rather than the failures. A president who has a couple of great successes may outrank a president with no failures.

Reagan is generally remember for his restructuring of the US economy by gashing marginal tax rates across the board and effectively managing the end of the Cold War (not “ending” it necessarily).

Those are enduring achievements that will be remembered far beyond the litany of complaints some ideologues might have about his presidency.