Reagan did exactly the same thing in 1982 (or thereabouts). He refused to sign off on the budget, effectively shutting the government down for a few days.
The difference is that Clinton was treated like a hero for doing it, while Reagan was attacked savagely by the press for playing ‘brinksmanship’.
As I said before, you can’t blame or give a president credit for everything that happens in his term, especially in terms of economics. For one thing, the first year of his term is spent under the budget of the last president. For another, the economy has a lot of inertia, and it can often take years for the total effects of a government decision to filter through. So it’s often hard to place cause-and-effect. And finally, the vast majority of the economy has nothing at all to do with what the President says or does.
This is what gives partisans the wiggle room to come to opposite conclusions about who was responsible for what.
But in other areas, we CAN directly assign credit or blame to the president. The ‘malaise’ that had settled over the U.S. was directly caused by Jimmy Carter, who spent his four years in office wringing his hands and making grave pronouncements about the state of the country and the world. He made his famous ‘malaise’ speech which put a label on it. The reason Reagan was elected President in a landslide had far more to do with his sunny outlook, optimism and humor than with any specific policy proposals he had. And he DID restore confidence to the American people.
Terrorism was rampant when Reagan took power, and almost nonexistant when he left. This was simply because people like Carter were always giving way to terrorists and letting them get what they wanted. Reagan let it be known that there would be no negotiation, and he backed it up during the Achille Lauro crisis, when American jets forced the terrorists out of the sky.
The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and were engaged in destabilizing countries throughout Africa and South America. Reagan’s hard-line stance put an end to that.
And yes, he is largely responsible for ending the cold war. The Soviet Union might have fallen anyway, but perhaps not for decades. No less an authority than Mikhail Gorbachev himself gives Reagan the bulk of the credit. Part of it was SDI, which the Soviets couldn’t match, but part of it was also Reagan’s rhetoric. He attacked the Soviet Union at every opportunity, calling them an Evil Empire etc. The result was dissatisfaction in the client states, which the Soviets responded to by putting a moderate in power to soften their image.
Once Reagan had a person in power he could actually talk to, he hammered on him relentlessly (“Mr. Gorbachev - TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!”). The combination of political pressure, economic pressure, and military pressure through SDI spelled the end. So yes, give credit to Gorbachev for doing his part, but give Reagan credit for getting Gorbachev into power in the first place, and for pushing Gorbachev into doing the right thing.