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From John Edwards's Foreign Affairs essay:

There was a time when a president did not speak just to Americans -- he spoke to the world. People thousands of miles away would gather to listen to someone they called, without irony, "the leader of the free world." Men and women in Nazi-occupied Europe would huddle around shortwave radios to listen to President Franklin Roosevelt. Millions cheered in Berlin when President John F. Kennedy stood with them and said, "Ich bin ein Berliner." Millions of people imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain silently cheered the day President Reagan declared, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

You know that Reagan has entered the pantheon of great presidents when even a liberal populist has to quote him approvingly.