Reagan was elected as a two term president and remains one of the more popular presidents in recent history.

Reasonable people may respectfully disagree about whether or not he was a good president and whether or not he took the country in the right direction, but I think anyone saying he was not a successful person is using a very different definition of "success" than the common meaning.

He was elected President of the United States - I'd say that should count as successful in anybody's book. The metric isn't 'effective' :)

I'd count achieving something less than 50 people in the world have achieved as a success regardless of politics.

So, I wrote a commercial compiler for a language that probably less than 50 people in my country have also written. Oh, I see what you mean.

lol...51st president of the us is going to be a failure

I was referring to being a political leader as something positive, being iffy. Nothing against the man specifically.

Yeah, It wasn't the unsustainable economic, political, social and environmental system that was Soviet totalitarianism. It wasn't the thousands of political dissidents in Easten Europe who were active, organizing and being persecuted before Reagan was even elected.

No, it was all because your Actor-President gave a nice speech and ran a deficit.

Hello Reddit! :)

(If I was American I'd probably vote for Democrats most of the time, but it's funny how users seem to know exactly what did or didn't cause the fall of the Eastern Bloc)

I'm pretty sure decades of mismanagement, the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and a broken oil pipeline caused the collapse of the USSR.

Ronny Ray Gun just happened to be in office at the time.

But becoming president of the US is huge! Only a few dozen people have ever managed to do so :-)

Yeah, he also caused the return of the Halley comet.

I mean, he was in office when it happened, right? He must have caused it.