Was The Real Reagan Too Liberal For Today's GOP?

Most likely.  Here's All Things Considered on the subject:

Reporter Walter Shapiro is covering his ninth presidential campaign, now for Yahoo! News and The New Republic. He tells NPR's Raz that there were plenty of Reagan-era policies that wouldn't sit well with the GOP today — like raising taxes.
In the early '80s there was a deficit problem, and after massively lowering taxes there was an adjustment upward. Reagan's tax reform of 1986, which basically eliminated a number of deductions in order to lower rates, would be attacked today, Shapiro says.
"In an attack ad today," he adds, "you'd say, 'Whose side is he on?"
Also in 1986, Reagan's Immigration Reform and Control Act granted amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants who entered the U.S. prior to Jan. 1, 1982.
"This is the immigration bill that the Republicans are railing against when they say, 'No more amnesties' — and this was Ronald Reagan," he says.
Many of the GOP candidates running for president have repeatedly pointed out that many — mostly poor — Americans don't pay federal income taxes. But in his 1985 State of the Union address, Reagan said he'd propose the exemption of federal income taxes to those living at or below the poverty line.
"This is, again, the problem with this plaster-saint iconography," Shapiro says.
There are many ways in which Reagan was a genuine conservative, Shapiro says, but he wasn't consistent. If Reagan were running today, Shapiro can imagine superPAC ads referring to him as a "former liberal-Democrat" or "tax-raiser Ronald Reagan."

The Republican Party has created a caricature of Ronald Reagan, much as they've created a caricature of President Obama.  Neither person they think they know actually ever existed.  It is really odd that Eric Cantor's chief of staff interjected during Cantor's 60 Minutes interview that Reagan never raised taxes, even though one can easily look up the fact that he did raise taxes, a number of times.  How can an entire political party ignore reality as consistently as the Republicans do?