I'm guessing that Reagan's rating will continue to fall off with historical perspective. Think of him as the inspirational speaker that has you agreeing with him emphatically as he plies his trade, but once you have a chance to mull over his words you aren't so sure. Reagan was good at convincing us that he was among the best, but with a few years to think about it, it becomes apparent that he was little better than mediocre.
-- Doug Given the overwhelming leftist bias of most academic historians, it's hard to imagine how this could play out, whatever you think of Reagan. As our distance from the political battles of the 1980s increases, it seems almost inevitable that his rating will improve, simply because there will be fewer historians who remember him as their hated conservative enemy and more who consider him as the man who was elected in 1980 (when the most important IR book of the last generation or so, _War & Change in World Politics_ was published and spent its last chapter on how the US would deal with the Soviet Union's _inevitable_ rise to equality in terms of world power) and left office in 1989 with the USSR almost on its knees. This is not a small change, to put it mildly. Gautam
