Twenty-six years after President Ronald Reagan left the White House after two terms in office, he remains a relevant figure in modern politics, Reagan biographer Craig Shirley said Friday on
Newsmax TV's "America's Forum."
Even liberal historians such as John Patrick Diggins and James MacGregor Burns have credited Reagan, a Republican icon, as being one of the greatest presidents in American history, noted Shirley, author of
"Reagan's Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All".
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"When you have liberal historians saying this about Reagan, it gives us all pause to really shed our ideology and our personal biases, strip away all that and simply look at the fact of the presidency of Reagan," he said. "One has to conclude that he was an extremely successful president."
When assessing Reagan's presidency, it must be judged in the shadow of the Cold War, which the U.S. was winning by 1986, according to Shirley, who pointed out that Reagan's ideas and principles, not his name or fortune, earned him the respect he garnered.
"Reagan was the most successful Republican nominee and Republican president to be elected outright in his own right and not to inherit the presidency or having it bequeathed to him," he said.
"Reagan formulated a political strategy that was appealing to both populist Republicans in the primary and populist Democrats in the general. That's why he got in 1980 one in three Democratic voters when he was running against Jimmy Carter in the general election."
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