From a reader:

Jonah:
In reading your “Buffy” column Friday, with the references to
Spiderman, I remembered that Reagan once said that in reading the
newspaper, he would read the comic page first, and the first strip he would
read was Spiderman. The media, of course, implied that this was further
proof that Reagan was a simpleton.
But it occurred to me that so many of the qualities of Spiderman were
apparent in Reagan. First is the philosophical starting point that with
great power comes great responsibility. And that responsibility is to
actively fight against evil, wherever it may be found. In the Spiderman
story, Uncle Ben dies because Peter Parker chose to step aside and not get
involved in a situation that didn’t appear to be his problem. Reagan
could have taken the position that rolling back communism was not really
America’s problem– so long as it was contained and not causing us any
problems, what did it matter. Instead, he did what he did.
The notion that there is good and evil in the world, though not
specific to Spiderman, is a very comic-book type worldview, and Reagan
wasn’t afraid to express express that worldview even though he was
lampooned for it. Which leads me to another similarity. Reagan, like
Spidey, was a happy warrior. Throughout the years, how many times has
Spiderman thanklessly rescued J. Jonah Jameson from various predicaments,
with nothing to show for it but more bad press ? Even though Jameson
continually says hateful and untrue things about him, Spiderman just sort
of laughs it off, and jokes that it is all part of being a super-hero.
Spiderman also always displayed a sense of humor when dealing with
villains, and a certain self-effacement that was similar to Reagan’s. He
never displayed the anger of Batman, or the self-righteousness of Superman.
He did what he did because that was his duty, knowing that, as the song
goes, “action is his reward.”
In writing this, I realize I run the risk of portraying Reagan as a
crudely drawn, comic-book figure– but what I’m trying to say is that the
values that Reagan represented were in many ways mythic and transcendant.
Its not so much that Reagan was like Spiderman, but that Reagan embodied
the heroic qualities that too many people think only exist in comic books.