Admirers Can’t Get Enough of Things Named Reagan

(Steve Friess/AOL.com) – They’ve already named an airport, an aircraft carrier, a courthouse, a medical center, at least two post offices, several schools and more than two dozen roads for him. A McDonald’s in Alabama where he once ate even boasts a bust of him.

Yet that’s not enough for the most devout supporters of Ronald Reagan. A year from this coming Saturday would have been the former president’s 100th birthday. To honor him, his admirers are fanning out around the nation hoping to win another one for the Gipper. And another. And another.

Their goal: Get at least one significant landmark in every state named for the nation’s 40th president, who left office in 1989 and died in 2004…

“We decided to aim for the biggest possible thing, which is a mountain,” said Karri Bragg, 24, who heads up an effort in the Silver State being dubbed the Reagan Legacy Project and will kick off the formal effort at a Reagan birthday celebration at a Las Vegas casino…

But Bragg has learned that the namings can get tangled in local politics.

She was surprised to realize upon leaving Norquist’s organization to work in Las Vegas for the advocacy organization Citizens Outreach that nothing there had yet been named for Reagan despite the Silver State’s prominent role in the former California governor’s presidency.

Paul Laxalt, a former Nevada senator, was a key Reagan ally in Congress. The state’s most prominent GOP spinmeister, Sig Rogich, created the “Morning in America” ads for the 1984 re-election campaign. And Frank Fahrenkopf Jr., now the gaming industry’s chief lobbyist, was chairman of the Republican National Committee for most of the Reagan presidency.

Yet despite the construction of more than 200 schools in once-burgeoning Las Vegas since the 1980s, none has been named for Reagan. So Bragg said she’s looking for a mountain to name for Reagan somewhere other than in the Democratic stronghold of Clark County, which contains Las Vegas.

“We’re trying to find a peak that’s in a place where people in that community would be supportive of it,” she said, specifying rural northern Nevada as a likely target. “We’re not planning to drop it in a town where the people just reject it.”

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