Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [321]
Roosevelt could only assume that Taft wished, quite understandably, to counteract the “residuary legatee” factor. Plump, lovable Will must know what he was doing. If not, the rather less lovable Mrs. Taft certainly did.
THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN of 1908 began in earnest after Labor Day. But earnestness did not translate into energy. Ideologically, the two main candidates were hampered by the fact that there was little difference between their respective platforms. The Republican Party was for the protective tariff, but not averse to reforming it; the Democratic Party wanted revision, but shrank from the idea of free trade. Both camps vowed a limited war on monopoly, called for more railroad regulation, and demanded fairer treatment for labor. Theodore Roosevelt may have been excluded physically from the campaign, but its very blandness was testimony to his de ipse domination of American politics: he could have written either platform himself.
He fretted, longing to get involved, as he had during his own campaign four years before. “For reasons which I am absolutely unable to fathom,” he wrote Elihu Root, “Taft does not arouse the enthusiasm which his record and personality warranted us in believing he ought to arouse.” A note of irritation, as of a patron taken too much for granted, colored his continuing advice to the candidate. He stopped just short of giving direct orders:
You should put yourself prominently and emphatically into this campaign. Also I hope to see everything done henceforth to give the impression that you are working steadily in the campaign. It seems absurd, but I am convinced that the prominence that has been given to your golf playing has not been wise, and from now on I hope that your people will do everything they can to prevent one word being sent out about either your fishing or your playing golf. The American people regard the campaign as a very serious business, and we want to be careful that your opponents do not get the chance to misrepresent you as not taking it with sufficient seriousness.
Without being so tactless as to refer to the widely published image of Taft, in midswing, trying to circumnavigate his own circumference, he warned him to stay away from candid press cameras: “I never let friends advertise my tennis, and never let a photograph of me in tennis costume appear.”
He tried to coach Taft in the art of personality projection. “Let the audience see you smile always, because I feel that your nature shines out so transparently when you smile—you big, generous, high-minded fellow.” But back of the smile, there should be the aggression of a fighter for the right. “Hit at them; challenge Bryan on his record.”
As September progressed, with little noticeable change in traditional party loyalties, Roosevelt calmed down. Every vote for the status quo ante was a vote for continued GOP dominance of all three branches of government.
Only one discord, an unresolvable one, affected Republican harmony. It was that of Brownsville. The Senate Committee on Military Affairs may have upheld the President’s action, and Foraker may have been eliminated as a candidate, but the anger of black voters in such key states as Ohio and New York was potentially threatening to Taft. They did not have to give their support to Bryan to cripple his candidacy; if they were merely solid in refusing to vote at all, he could lose and lose.
Roosevelt got, if not consolation for the major mistake of his presidency, a certain grim satisfaction out of seeing Foraker totally humiliated on 17 September. William Randolph Hearst,