There you go again. Mr. Knott. You generously allow that 'perhaps even Reagan himself wished to repeal the Great Society.' This statement is deceptive, at best.

Let's look at the beginning of Reagan's political career, before he was a politician, yet involved himself in politics. Reagan's first cause was to fight against the passage of 'socialized medicine' which is what the Right called what came to be known as Medicare. In the service of the AMA, which wanted to defeat what it called "a system of socialized medicine for our senior citizens and seriously curtail the quality of medical care in the United States," Reagan recorded an LP called Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine. This record was distributed as a key part of the conservative backlash against the passage of Medicare.

As Drew Pearson wrote in his Washington Post column at the time:

Ronald Reagan of Hollywood has pitted his mellifluous voice against President Kennedy in the battle for medical aid for the elderly. As a result it looks as if the old folks would lose out. He has caused such a deluge of mail to swamp Congress that Congressmen want to postpone action on the medical bill until 1962. What they don’t know, of course, is that Ron Reagan is behind the mail; also that the American Medical Association is paying for it.

Reagan is the handsome TV star for General Electric . . . Just how this background qualifies him as an expert on medical care for the elderly remains a mystery. Nevertheless, thanks to a deal with the AMA, and the acquiescence of General Electric, Ronald may be able to outinfluence the President of the United States with Congress

The entire backstory is in this essay, which also encapsulates our current theme nicely by recounting how Reagan was able to dodge Carter's factual points against him (also including Reagan's early proposal to make Social Security voluntary) by employing his glib and sunny 'there you go again' riposte.

Mr. Knott's last paragraph is summarily misleading, because it omits the cuts that Reagan wanted, and even proposed, but could not pass in Congress. A more detailed analysis and quantification of the actual numbers is available in this pdf report Social Policy in the Age of Reagan and Thatcher. Here's a key graf:

Had Reagan obtained all he asked for, Bowden and Palmer estimate that the net effect of proposed reductions for social programmes by the 1985 fiscal year would have been over $75 billion (about 2 per cent of the GNP), for a reduction of more than one-sixth below prior levels. Three-fifths of the spending of the discretionary grant programmes of Great Society vintage would have been cut, one-fourth of that earmarked for low-income assistance, and a little more than one-tenth of the social insurance programmes. Congress gave the president most of what he wanted in budgetary terms in 1981 but enacted far fewer cuts thereafter. It is safe to estimate that overall Reagan got about half what he requested, and that amounted to a reduction of just under 10 per cent from previous policy levels.

The meaning of 'shredded' can be debated ad infinitum, but it's clear that Reagan would have gone much further, absent resistance from Congress.

Regarding the original theme of this point, the report above makes it clear that the Reagan policies disproportionately affected minority women and their children, so, once again, we have the same fundamental debate about Reagan, from those like Mr. Knott, who admire the window display, and from the rest of us who have looked inside at the actual inventory.

My goodness...reading some of these posts about Reagan (the most recent ones being that he was the Great Compromiser who actually raised taxes as part of his beloved 'trickle down economics' and now the president that expanded welfare) you'd think he was a liberal hero.

Not only did Reagan want to shred the Great Society and wanted to lay waste to the New Deal as have all Republicans on the far right. This attempted remaking of the Reagan 'legacy' is revisionist history at its worst. He empowered the Religious Right and their intolerance, the deregulation which was the centerpiece of 'trickle down economics led to both the S&L debacle and our current economic mess and his foreign policy empowered tyrants the likes Saddam Hussein and the Central American death squads resulting in hundreds of thousands of innocent people being killed all in defense of truth, justice and the American Way. Why would anybody want to use Reagan as an example of anything positive?

He was only a great communicator in an Elmer Gantry sense...aka a fraud. He tricked people into believing he was helping them as he did harm to them. This is something to be admired?

CBS interviewed Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter during the Reagan years and Mike Wallace asked what they thought had been Reagan's greatest achievement.

Rosalyn replied; "This administration has allowed people to feel comfortable with their prejudices."

I've never heard RR's legacy so finely characterized.