Hoover had a similar description of FDR
Which isn't to say FDR and Reagan were in any way qualitatively close. But both men had political agendas that varied substantially from the prior administrations. And they both moved rapidly away from the direction of prior administrations.
Reagan was the first real neoconservative President, the closest thing to a Libertarian president the country has had since Coolidge, and a man who had surrounded himself with leaders of the conservative congressional minority with the intent of flipping the legislature.
I'm not shocked to hear he was blind and deaf to Carter's "Top 20 issues" given that these simply didn't concern a guy whose priorities were deregulation, tax cuts, privatization, and military exports.