I wonder how Reagan would be criticized now by our own if today were his time, and not 1980.
In 1980 the ACU and CPAC were extremely vitriolic in their personal attacks on the B movie star union official who was really a Democrat and only recently claiming to be a Republican. Even in 1982 the attacks on Reagan from Republicans and Conservatives were extremely ad hominem.
It was only after Reagan won again in 1984 that he slowly morphed into an icon.
We have a long, long history of eating our own.
Cruz, Santorum and Huckabee compete for the same religious right establishment. Thus Huckabee is extremely un-Christian when Cruz is around. But Cruz can be very Christian when Trump is around as Trump isn’t competing to be the “Christian” candidate.
That's not how I remember it. Reagan spoke at CPAC 12 times. "In his 1985 speech, he referred to CPAC as his "opportunity to dance with the one that brung ya", referring to CPAC having been a contributing factor to his political success" [Wikipedia].
ACU’s key successes in this period were the fight against SALT II, employing most of the same mechanisms used in the Panama Canal campaign, its leadership in coalitions that defeated national health insurance and secured trucking industry deregulation, a strong protest against U.S. abandonment of historic ties to the Republic of China, and its involvement in the 1980 Reagan campaign. Several of ACU’s directors and staffers participated in the campaign and went on to serve in the Reagan Administration while Reagan himself, as president, would speak at every CPAC except one during his eight years in office. - See more at: http://conservative.org/acu-history/#sthash.fngF3kXa.dpuf [ACU website]
It is true that Phil Crane ran against Reagan in 1980, and that after Reagan's defeat in 1976, M. Stanton Evans and William Rusher talked third party, but I don't see any trace of ACU or CPAC opposition to Reagan.
Conservatives were grateful in those days to have anybody in the White House who came close to their views and Reagan certainly fit the bill. There were stray voices about Reagan's Hollywood connections and divorce, but I don't see them as having been ideologically motivated. In his second term, Reagan did face criticism from neocons who thought he trusted Gorbachev too much.