How was bush different from Reagan?

Answer 1

A funny thing happened to Ronald Reagan on the way to his place in history. At the three-quarter point, he made a sharp left turn, then another, and ended his journey going in the opposite direction from his start. Initially, he was headed towards the title of the toughest Cold War president of all. His rhetoric was bellicose in the extreme, as "evil empire" replaced detente. When martial law descended on Poland, Reagan tried to organize an economic blockade of the Soviet Union. On the military front, he launched the greatest arms race in history, topped by the single most expensive weapons system ever undertaken.

But history will remember Reagan as the first Cold War president to preside over eight years of unbroken peace, the first to reach an arms reduction accord with the Soviets, and the American president who helped make it possible for Mikhail Gorbachev to begin the process of restructuring Soviet society.

Historians will also stress the gap between Reagan's domestic goals and his accomplishments. Most obvious is the deficit; what he promised to eliminate he has allowed to swell beyond comprehension. On the social agenda, abortion remains legal, prayer in the schools illegal. Reagan's failure in the war against drugs and related crime activities is so great that drugs were the number one issue in the 1988 presidential campaign.

Nevertheless, Reagan will be remembered as the president who reversed the decades-old flow of power to Washington. By dismantling some federal programs, and reducing others, he forced the states and the cities to assume more responsibility for running their own shows. If he failed to break the Democratic hold on Congress, he did force the Democratic Party to move to the right.

When Reagan entered politics 22 years ago virtually every Democrat outside Dixie identified himself, proudly, as a liberal; today, in large part because of Reagan, almost every Democrat in the nation tries to call himself a conservative.

Answer 2

• Until the 1960s, when he became Governor of California, Ronald Reagan had been a movie actor and TV star. Some of the movies he was famous for are Knute Rockne - All American, Kings Row, and Bedtime for Bonzo.
• He was by far the oldest U.S. President, having turned 70 less than a month into his eight years as President. Four of his predecessors, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford and Carter, were younger than him. He broke his own record for oldest person to win a U.S. presidential election when he won re-election in 1984 at age 73.
• He was the only U.S. President who had been divorced.
• He was the first U.S. president to live past the age of 91. He died at age 93, a record he held for only about two years before Gerald Ford beat it by 45 days.
• He liked jelly beans.