SACRAMENTO, CA - Tomorrow, February 6, is Ronald Reagan’s 91st birthday. A poll taken last August by ABC News found that Reagan is more popular with the American people today than at any time during his presidency (his approval rating is nearly 70 percent), while a recent Gallup Poll found that among 18 to 30 year-olds, Reagan is rated as our nation’s greatest president by a small plurality. To liberals dispirited by these findings I can only say--it serves them right for running down all those dead white males like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.

But this helps explain why Reagan is getting the silent treatment right now from liberal intellectuals, who manifestly failed in their attempts to do to Reagan what a generation of liberal intellectuals and historians did to Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover back in the 1940s and 1950s. Throughout the 1980s there was book after book from liberals savagely attacking Reagan. Right now their big guns are quiet, and liberals are leaving Reagan alone. But make no mistake: their hatred of Reagan remains unabated. In fact, much of the partisan bitterness we have seen in the last few years reflects the lasting anger and resentment by liberals at the way Reagan derailed liberalism’s near-monopoly in American politics. During Reagan’s presidency Edward Shils observed that “Liberals would sooner see their society ruined than learn something valuable to its preservation from conservatism.” This remains just as true today.

Reagan’s moment transcends his time in office, and indeed we can still be said to be living in “the Age of Reagan.” Just as FDR cast a long shadow over the next generation of American political life, Reagan’s shadow over our subsequent political course is proving to be similarly long. Even the greatest and most successful politicians typically end their careers with a large note of failure hanging over their head. Lincoln died with the question mark of reconciliation and reconstruction. Woodrow Wilson left office amidst the failure of the League of Nations treaty. FDR died, and Churchill left office, with World War II won, but with the seeds of the Cold War clearly germinating. Truman left office amidst the debacle of the Korean War. Reagan left office with the Cold War still going, and with astronomical budget deficits that threatened the nation’s well-being for as far as the eye could see--a seemingly long-term legacy of failure.

Yet within a breathtakingly short time by political standards, the Cold War was over and the nation’s biggest fiscal problem was what to do with its soaring budget surpluses. Both events lent a large measure of vindication to Reagan’s designs. His huge budget deficits, Lou Cannon has remarked, now look like the wartime deficits of the final campaign of the Cold War, and, therefore, are seen as a bargain. Although other leaders at home and abroad deserve their share of the credit for these happy events, it is hard to conceive of their advent without Reagan.

During the first few years of Reagan’s post-presidency, surveys of academic historians ranked him near the bottom of all presidents. Now he is climbing, Truman-like, in esteem. A recent survey of academic historians by C-SPAN ranks him 11th among all presidents, above Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and George Bush.

Happy birthday, Mr. President.