Margaret Thatcher said: 'President Reagan has achieved the most difficult of all political tasks: changing attitudes and perceptions about what is possible,' Thatcher said in a tribute to Reagan shortly before he left office. 'From the strong fortress of his convictions, he set out to enlarge freedom the world over at a time when freedom was in retreat -- and he succeeded.' (washingtonpost.com)

A prominent Democratic critic, Sen. Gary Hart (Colo.), said Reagan was politically successful "not because he is the Great Communicator but because he has values and ideas and acts on them."

This evaluation approximated Reagan's own view. "I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference; it was the content," Reagan said in his farewell address as president. "I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn't spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation -- from our experience, our wisdom and our belief in the principles that have guided us for two centuries."

Reagan burst into political prominence in 1964 with a rousing nationally televised speech for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater that stressed anti-government themes and portrayed the election as a choice between individual freedom and "the ant heap of totalitarianism."

I always thought of Reagan, while I was a high-schooler, as the Anti-Totalitarian. Whatever his faults and limitations, he made me believe that we were doing everything possible to win against the bad guys, in Russia, Poland, Berlin, Libya, Nicaragua. Among my white middle-class circle of friends, there was no dissent in our boisterous support of Reagan against the criticism of teachers and professors. I never thought of myself as a conservative then, but I couldn't understand the criticism he received for calling the Soviet Union an evil empire. As George Will said on Larry King a little while ago, "both the noun and the adjective were exactly correct." When I found the group that refused to accept that denunciation of Communism, I discovered what I was not, politically.

Update: As I thought about the 'Anti-Totalitarian', I don't mean to say that Carter or other Democrats or Ford didn't oppose the Soviets or didn't treasure representative government; far from it. But there is something to be said for the art of rhetoric. Reagan let us know he had no intentions of losing the cold war.

Another interesting statement I heard from some talking head (maybe Chris Matthews) was that Reagan never saw the job of PotUS as a terrible burden -- he acted like it was a privilege and he seemed to enjoy being the leader of the free world, while not trivializing the great responsibility. That was a big shift after Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter all acted as though the office crushed their spirits.