Room For Reagan On Rushmore?

Travel to Washington by air and you'll land at Ronald Reagan National Airport.

Drive up Pennsylvania Avenue and there's the Ronald Reagan Federal Building, the biggest in the capital. With its 10-story atrium and offices crawling with bureaucrats, it's a colossal tribute, however incongruous, to a president who stood for small government.

And this is just the start, if a group of dedicated 'Reaganauts' has its way, reports CBS News Correspondent Eric Engberg.

Grover Norquist of the Reagan Legacy Project said he'd like to see "A large statue of Reagan with one foot in Maine and the other in Florida, so everybody who comes to the United States could sort of fly under the legs. That would be one goal."

He's kidding... a little.

With the D.C. airport renamed in Reagan's honor, Norquist now wants every state and county to do what Florida and California have already done: Name something after the 40th president.

Norquist says he's only copying what Democrats did.

"The people around John F. Kennedy," he says, "ran a protracted and committed campaign and effort to make sure that their understanding and their view of his role in history and his presidency was memorialized as an important thing."

Some Reagan supporters even dare to dream of the ultimate honor: A spot for their hero on Mount Rushmore. Congressman Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) is pushing legislation to do it.

"In order to get a debate of this magnitude on the radar screen," sad Salmon, "we had to get something that was probably a little bit out there."

So they aimed high. Too high, at least, for Democrats, who say there's not enough carvable rock left on the mountain. And who also argue Mr. Reagan's legacy doesn't reach Rushmore heights.

Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) said "If they're really going to look for another thing to name after Ronald Reagan, perhaps the $250 billion in debt service this year to cover the cost of the debts we ran up in the 1980s can be renamed 'Reagan Payments.'"

There's no record that the monumentally modest Mr. Reagan ever asked to have his name put on anything. It was more his style to take delight in the fact that the pub in Ireland where he stopped for a beer was renamed the Ronald Reagan Lounge.

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