If you read or see the two-part, Pulitzer-prize winning (and scandalous) play Angels in America, which takes place in the 1980s, during the Reagan Revolution, then you’ll get a good feel for how most liberals hated – really hated – Ronald Reagan.  He was everything bad about America, to them.  But now, more than 20 years later, and Barack Obama, new scion of the liberal elite, is calling him a great president.  What happened?  This Newsweek piece proposes to answer the question: Why are liberals finally loving on Reagan?

[H]e understood that you cannot govern this country if you’re a pessimist. Pessimism has always been a strand of conservatism-pessimism about human nature, pessimism about government. [...] He said that when the American people are happy, good things happen: they invest, they save, they have children. So he thought that getting America back to cheerfulness was an intensely practical program.

So, that’s one reason.  And it’s a nice thought.  Of course, one can believe in a fallen human nature and be perennially happy.  In fact, one can only be truly happy if one understands the true character of creation, but only if one also understands that all this can be redeemed.  Reagan was an optimist, and a realist.  He was, after all, a man who called evil what it was.  Christians, too, should be optimists.