Your statement about Reagan's approval rating didn't ring true to me, so I looked it up. Here is an excerpt from a piece titled "Five myths about Ronald Reagan":
1. Reagan was one of our most popular presidents.
It's true that Reagan is popular more than two decades after leaving office. A CNN/Opinion Research poll last month gave him the third-highest approval rating among presidents of the past 50 years, behind John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. But Reagan's average approval rating during the eight years that he was in office was nothing spectacular - 52.8 percent, according to Gallup. That places the 40th president not just behind Kennedy, Clinton and Dwight Eisenhower, but also Lyndon Johnson and George H.W. Bush, neither of whom are talked up as candidates for Mount Rushmore.
During his presidency, Reagan's popularity had high peaks - after the attempt on his life in 1981, for example - and huge valleys. In 1982, as the national unemployment rate spiked above 10 percent, Reagan's approval rating fell to 35 percent. At the height of the Iran-Contra scandal, nearly one-third of Americans wanted him to resign.
In the early 1990s, shortly after Reagan left office, several polls found even the much-maligned Jimmy Carter to be more popular. Only since Reagan's 1994 disclosure that he had Alzheimer's disease - along with lobbying efforts by conservatives, such as Grover Norquist's Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which pushed to rename Washington's National Airport for the president - has his popularity steadily climbed.
washingtonpost.com
And here is Gallup's summary of his approval ratings during his term:
In the most general sense, Americans' approval of the job being done by Reagan as president during his eight years in office can be described as a bell-shaped curve of sorts, with Reagan's ratings starting low, rising in late 1983 and in 1984 (just in time for his successful 1984 re-election bid), and then falling in the last years of his administration.
Ronald Reagan's Job Approval:
Yearly Averages, 1981-1988 |  |
gallup.com
As Carter's final approval rating--well, yeah, there was the takeover of the embassy, inflation and the recession. Like duh, it was low. But as I said before, some presidents are more in thrall to circumstances beyond their control than others, and other presidents do things that create circumstances in their term. Carter was one of the former, IMHO, and Reagan would have been one of the latter if he had not lowered taxes well beyond what he should have done and helped to fan the attitude of "Guv'ment is the problem". |
