Taft 2012 - Jason Heller [58]
SUSAN WESCHLER: Thank you, Pauline. You’re right, that is the most important question. Mr. Taft is doing very well. As you know, while we had a scare for a moment there last week, there was no actual violence, and Mr. Taft and his campaign are rolling ahead as planned. We’ll be holding Taft events tomorrow in Austin, Friday in Little Rock, and Tuesday in Miami.
PAULINE CRAIG: Jack Channing, the alleged assailant—according to the police, he’s a classic fan turned-stalker case, a film buff who became obsessed with Orson Welles’s President Kane, collected all sorts of memorabilia from the movie, and developed an unhealthy level of interest in President Taft’s real life, to the point where his whole self-identity revolved around being the world’s most knowledgeable Taft fan.
SUSAN WESCHLER: Uh, yes. That’s, that’s what they’re saying. Again, we shouldn’t forget that the man was harmless.
PAULINE CRAIG: Maybe harmless—definitely disturbing. Channing made a Web site way back in 1998 to present several elaborately spun theories as to what might have caused the president’s disappearance in 1913. A freak horseback-riding accident on the bank of the Potomac River. Or an overblown conspiracy involving Taft’s late father, Alphonso, who’d founded the secret Skull and Bones society at Yale. Channing was used to being the Taft guy with an answer to everything—so when the real Taft returned to life, they say Channing became obsessed with the idea that it had to be a hoax, because otherwise it would mean he didn’t really know anything after all.
SUSAN WESCHLER: Well, I suppose that’s the difference between a historian and a conspiracy nut. Those of us who really study history know that there’s always the possibility of a new discovery that will throw everything we thought we knew into a whole new light. Whereas the conspiracy theorists are just practicing pseudo-history—they let their, uh, their personal, ah, feelings and beliefs about the subject matter become more important than pursuing the questions of actual historical truth.
PAULINE CRAIG: That’s all well and good, Professor, but there are certainly a lot of regular Americans today whose feelings and beliefs about William Howard Taft have built his campaign into the historic phenomenon it is. Some of them are your colleagues in the Taft Party! Let’s say hello to Matt Shelby, the Taft Party’s Northwest regional coordinator. Matt, Bill Taft dodged an imaginary bullet last week. What about the metaphorical bullets? Some critics in the D.C. establishment have suggested that the Taft campaign doesn’t have a cohesive political platform. How do you respond to that?
MATT SHELBY: Pauline, William Howard Taft’s politics have been on record for a hundred years now. I’d have to say these critics are either too lazy to spend a few minutes looking them up, or they hold the American people in such contempt that they think they’re too lazy to look them up. Either way, they’re wrong. President Taft governed in the twentieth century with the same principled convictions he’ll govern with in the twenty-first. A determination to put the American people’s interests first. A commitment to absolute honesty and accountability at every level of his administration. And an absolute respect for governing by the precise letter of the law.
PAULINE CRAIG: Victoria Freeman Eldridge, you’ve been responsible for the Taft Party’s agenda in New England. While Matt Shelby here was a Democrat before he joined the Taft cause, you were a Republican.
VICTORIA FREEMAN ELDRIDGE: A Libertarian, actually, Pauline.
PAULINE CRAIG: But a fiscal conservative, for sure.
VICTORIA FREEMAN ELDRIDGE: Absolutely. I voted for Republican presidents most of my life because that was the closest I could get to a proper conservative candidate. That’s why I was so excited to join the Taft Party—Taft doesn’t just talk the