Editorial: The Gipper and the Deep Blue Sea

Of all the more than 3,000 landmarks named for President Ronald Reagan — from scores of schools and highways to an aircraft carrier and a mountain — nothing comes close to this: designating 3.4 million square nautical miles of ocean as the biggest, wettest and most ambitious Reagan memorial yet imagined.

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House Republicans have taken committee action approving floor debate on just such an expanse of The Deep — the Ronald Wilson Reagan Exclusive Economic Zone, a sovereignty-protected resources and development area bigger than that of the 50 states' land mass. It encompasses all ocean areas up to 200 nautical miles out from the nation's 13,000 miles of coastline. The zone already exists under a directive President Reagan signed in 1983.

"We don't live in the United States of Coolidge, or fly through the Warren G. Harding airspace," Representative Alan Lowenthal, an exasperated Democrat, noted in committee debate in July. "Why should we steam or sail on the Reagan ocean?" An impassioned Republican, Representative Tom McClintock, shot back that "President Obama is getting credit for one-sixth of the economy under Obamacare." (Such is Congressional debate on the rare day it happens.)

Representative Darrell Issa's proposal to dub the rolling seas with the Reagan name might offer some consolation for Reagan loyalists who haven't forgotten the slight suffered 17 years ago when more than 700 historians and scholars ranked Mr. Reagan merely 25th among the first 40 presidents in the Presidential Greatness Index.

In response, Grover Norquist, the tax-cutting zealot who seems to exercise nearly total power over conservative Republicans, created the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, dedicated to sponsoring separate memorials in each of the 50 states and 3,140 counties of the nation. When National Airport outside Washington was renamed for Ronald Reagan, Mr. Norquist declared that Mr. Reagan "deserves a monument like the Jefferson or the F.D.R. — or the Colossus at Rhodes!" The very idea of a vast Reagan ocean (even if it's deep-sixed by the Senate Democrats) seems to be on that scale.

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