Yeah! Right!
That's why the establishment fought him so! Still do in fact!
No, you're fantasizing.
I was around and reading OpEds too.
Podhoretz constantly attacked him for not being a conservative:
“In his first term,” Podhoretz wrote, “
Mr. Reagan proved unwilling to take the political risks and expend the political energy that a real break with the underlying assumption of détente would have entailed… overwhelmed by the political present, and perhaps lured by seductive fantasies of what historians in the future might have to say about him as a peacemaker, Mr. Reagan seems ready to embrace the course of détente as wholeheartedly as his own.”Podhoretz later accused Reagan of "appeasement" for withdrawing from Lebanon, and of having “shamed himself and the country” with his “craven eagerness” to give away America’s nuclear advantage.
Pat Buchanan, in a Newsweek piece titled “A Conservative Makes A Final Plea" urged Reagan to shun arms control agreements as a liberal “object of veneration” and “golden calf,” avoiding compromise with the left at home and the Soviets abroad during his final years in office.
Reagan himself wrote about his struggles against conservatives in his autobiography "An American Life":
"When I began entering into the give and take of legislative bargaining in Sacramento, a lot of the most radical conservatives who had supported me during the election didn't like it. "Compromise" was a dirty word to them and they wouldn't face the fact that we couldn't get all of what we wanted today. They wanted all or nothing and they wanted it all at once. If you don't get it all, some said, don't take anything. "I'd learned while negotiating union contracts that you seldom got everything you asked for. And I agreed with FDR, who said in 1933: 'I have no expectations of making a hit every time I come to bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average.”
"If you got seventy-five or eighty percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later, and that's what I told these radical conservatives who never got used to it."Here's what Newt Gingrich said about Reagan in the 1980's:
“Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire’s challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic change in strategy will continue to fail. . . . President Reagan is clearly failing.” Gingrich described the 1985 Reagan/Gorbachev as “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”
That's the same Newt Gingrich who is hailed as a conservative hero for putting together the Contract With America.
Podhoretz... Buchanan... Gingrich and those "radical conservatives" who opposed Reagan in California.
Before there was Romneycare, there was Medi-Cal.
He signed more wilderness protection laws than any President before him.
You support market-based energy solutions? Reagan established the Air Resources Board to intervene in the market and fight smog.
In 1986 he signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act and gave amnesty to 2.7 million illegal immigrants.
Does the 2nd Amendment protect our most important right?
In 1991 Reagan urged Congress to pass the Brady Bill... "enact it without further delay" were his exact words.
Is the gay agenda tearing at the very fabric of our society?
In 1978, he opposed California’s Proposition 6 ballot initiative, which would’ve barred gay men and women from working in public schools, and risked what his advisers predicted would be political suicide in taking to the airwaves to denounce it. Later, Reagan would become the first president to host an openly gay couple overnight at the White House. In 1981, he defied Jerry Falwell and other evangelical leaders by nominating Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. A moderate, she would go on, along with one of Reagan’s other nominees, Anthony Kennedy, to vote to uphold Roe v. Wade.
I loved President Reagan.
I would crawl over broken glass to vote for him again today.
He's not the construct of conservatives. He's the construct of the whole of the people IN SPITE of conservative opposition to his style of governance and support of compromise.
So I don't fabricate memes about the man, and I don't engage in revisionist history.
History is there for any who want to look for it beyond the memes and fabrications.