Taft 2012 - Jason Heller [34]
“How so?”
“Well, some of these people are just disgruntled voters looking for something new to rally around, but some of them sound like they’ve really studied your administration. I’m not the expert that Susan is on the fine points of all your old issues and policies, but it looks to me like a bunch of these Tafties know their stuff. God, I can’t believe they call themselves Tafties.”
Taft scowled harder. “And what does my administration have to do with anything America worries about in this day and age? I had no policy positions on your trillion-dollar national debt, on your nuclear and chemical warfare, on regulating your seven hundred broadcasting channels of television and Internet and cell phones and God only knows what else I don’t know about yet.”
“No,” said Rachel, looking over her shoulder, “but these people know you. I mean, obviously they don’t know you, but I’m kind of impressed at how thoroughly they’re trying.” She stared at the screen on her phone. “It looks like they’re skipping over a lot of the more controversial things from your presidency, over the points that are a little too dated to translate well today. But the gist of it is there: conservative yet forward-thinking, pro-business yet proregulation, principled yet open to compromise. It’s like America has been led to believe for so long that these are polarized ideas, ones that can’t possibly be reconciled, let alone work better together.
“And now here you come,” she went on, turning back to the highway, “straight from a time before this whole empty rhetoric of ‘bipartisanship’ we’ve all overused to the point of being meaningless. They all see something to admire in you. This woman in Florida likes that you were a thoughtful governor of the Philippines … this lawyer in South Carolina admires your negotiation skills, your dedication to diplomacy as the means to world peace … this coal miner in Wyoming, uh, seems to respect that you’re, quote, not afraid to stand big and proud in your resplendent girth in defiance of the impossible Hollywood standard, unquote. Whatever it is, they’re all talking about your return as being the next great inspirational force in grassroots politics. A true icon of the American people. A legacy that should inspire political action today.”
Taft lowered his voice to avoid waking Susan; the last thing he needed was her jumping into the conversation with an opinion on his icon-hood. “Rachel, forgive me for being cynical, but that all sounds a little too good to be true. Did you not three weeks ago tell me that I spent my century of absence being scarcely remembered as the wretched, irrelevant laughingstock of presidential history?”
“I know. It’s turned around on a dime. It’s bizarre. And yet, right there, what you just did a second ago—that’s the other thing: that self-deprecation of yours. These Tafties love it. All those times when you were in office and you spoke openly to the press about how reluctant you were to hold the presidency, how you couldn’t wait to leave it and get back to just being a judge again. Back then, all that talk was probably political suicide on the installment plan. Never mind ‘probably’; it was.
“But in hindsight? From the perspective of people today who have to put up with the twenty-four-hour news networks forcing never-ending political campaigns down our throat for three and a half out of every four years? You’re the most refreshing thing any of these bloggers have ever heard of. A president who doesn’t lust for power, or covet it once he has it. Grandpa, it may be a hundred years too late to do you the political good you needed, but, here and now, you’ve really connected.”
Taft wondered if, perhaps, he might find that prospect more comforting if he could grasp any of that connection himself. He peered out the van’s tinted window at this teeming, overbuilt, new America that flashed by. For, as things stood, his own space in this gigantically overwhelming new world still felt … small. Laughably, impossibly