Taft 2012

by Jason Heller

  taft2012

  I am further honored to have Congresswoman Rachel Taft—a strong, brilliant, devoted Ohioan and American if I do say so—as my running mate.

  njerica

  Holy crap, it’s for real! #Taft #2012election

  JudgeMatthews

  @taft2012 This is amazing. Finally, we’re going to have a candidate with the right experience to be president. He’s BEEN president.

  njerica

  Will never forget where I was when I saw @taft2012 on TV the 1st time. Now know what old folks mean when they say that about the Challenger.

  jamesjamesjames

  @taft2012 @TaftPartyUSA Where do I sign up as a campaign volunteer? #Taft

  SamFromChicago666

  @jamesjamesjames You and me both. That man is hot stuff. About time the Oval Office held some real beefcake! #Taft

  FollowTheLogicChain

  @jamesjamesjames Volunteer? Don’t. It’s all bullshit. You really believe President Taft came back like King Arthur to lead us? #TaftIsAHoax

  jamesjamesjames

  @FollowTheLogicChain Jeez, you hoaxers really believe the govt would make UP something this insane? Sometimes reality’s weird but awesome.

  FollowTheLogicChain

  @jamesjamesjames Believe in your version of reality if you will. I prefer actual reality. #TaftIsAHoax

  LindaBeach

  @jamesjamesjames There’s a volunteer forum at taft2012.com! Come join us. #Taft #2012election

  IanTheArtist

  @SamFromChicago666 Did you know Taft was the president who had the Oval Office built in the first place? #Taft

  SamFromChicago666

  @IanTheArtist I did not know that.

  “The president can exercise no power which cannot be fairly and reasonably traced to some specific grant of power in the Constitution or in an act of Congress. There is no vague extra power which he can exercise because it seems to him to be in the public interest.”

  —William Howard Taft, speech to the Delaware Taft Party, Feb. 22, 2012

  “Substantial progress toward better things can rarely be taken without developing new evils requiring new remedies. Look at modern agriculture—companies like Fulsom have delivered affordable foodstuffs in huge quantities that can feed Americans bountifully no matter their income, yet the food is not good; it makes me queasy both digestively and morally.”

  —William Howard Taft, speech to the West Virginia Taft Party, Feb. 25, 2012

  “I am in favor of helping the prosperity of all countries because, when we are all prosperous, the trade with each becomes more valuable to the other.”

  —William Howard Taft, speech to the Kansas Taft Party, March 2, 2012

  “Don’t worry over what the newspapers say. I don’t; why should anyone else?”

  —William Howard Taft, speech to the Wyoming Taft Party, March 5, 2012

  Transcript, Raw Talk with Pauline Craig, broadcast Feb. 16, 2012

  PAULINE CRAIG: Welcome to Raw Talk. I’m Pauline Craig, and today I’ll be talking with some outspoken supporters of William Howard Taft’s historic reentry into presidential politics. Joining me first via satellite is Frank Lommel, former president of the United Food and Factory Workers Local 15 in Colorado and now the Midwest coordinator for the Taft Party USA. Mr. Lommel, tell us how your friends in the union have responded to the Taft Party throwing its hat into the ring for the 2012 election.

  FRANK LOMMEL: Hi, Pauline, thanks for having me. Obviously, I don’t speak for the Local 15 anymore, but I’ve heard from a lot of workers who say they’re awfully interested in the Taft Party. They understand how abso-friggin’ great it is that a candidate who’s got such an incredible record of going after big, monopolistic businesses is being taken seriously by voters all across the country.

  PAULINE CRAIG: Let’s talk about that. When President Taft was in the White House a hundred years ago, breaking up monopolies—busting trusts, as they called it then—was his number-one priority. But is that really the issue that faces the workforce today? Health-care costs, huge unemployment rates, no respect from the liberal elite for enrolling students in good, solid vocational training—aren’t those the workforce problems any president will have to deal with?

  FRANK LOMMEL: Pauline, it all comes back to giant conglomerates that think they can act any darn way they please. If you look at the meat-processing industry, for instance, you see that there are huge numbers of low-paid immigrant workers being employed in the slaughterhouses and rendering facilities who haven’t had the freedom to unionize because all the big protein companies are specifically looking to keep wages low across the board. It’s not like these poor guys can go across the street and apply for a job at a more enlightened poultry producer. So the companies are collectively engaged in the sorts of behavior that monopolies can get away with, even though they’re not technically monopolies. That’s the sort of thing we Tafties know that William Howard Taft would never stand for—not a guy who’s proven himself willing to tackle the toughest conglomerates in the nation.

  PAULINE CRAIG: Big Labor. A demographic that always votes Democrat. And Frank Lommel is here on Raw Talk to say that a 155-year-old Republican-turned-third-party independent has at least one ex-union leader’s support. That’s something you don’t see every day.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Albuquerque looked like just another twinkling grid riveted into the landscape, one of dozens Taft had seen from his airplane window over the past several weeks as he’d begun to reacquaint himself with the now much quicker paced business of campaigning. Now that he’d become accustomed—or at least numb—to air travel, the whole business of looking down on the world from a six-mile height didn’t seem so unnatural. He’d even been able to enjoy and keep down a few dozen packets of delicious sweet nuts he’d been given by the fetching brunette attendant. They paired quite well, he had to admit, with the tiny bottles of whiskey he’d been steadily consuming since takeoff.

  Taft licked the astringent sweetness from the tips of his fledgling whiskers and sighed.

  “What’s the matter? You’re not getting sick again, are you?” Kowalczyk was staring at him and misinterpreting his downcast expression. The agent rooted around in the pocket on the back of the seat in front of him and drew out a paper sack.

  “What did you call that again?” Taft asked as Kowalczyk popped the sack open.

  “Barf bag.”

  “Ah, yes. Barf bag. The eloquence of the twenty-first century never ceases to astound me. See, Kowalczyk? This is why I need you to accompany me on my travels. How could I possibly survive in this dazzling new world without knowing the proper nomenclature of the barf bag?”

  Kowalczyk made a face at him. “Someone has to teach you the basics of survival while Professor Weschler is teaching you all the complicated stuff.”

  Taft looked around to make sure Susan hadn’t returned to her seat yet—how could anyone, no matter their size, squeeze into those infernally small airplane bathrooms, anyway?—and leaned his forehead against the cold pane of the window. “Susan is a dear woman, a learned scholar, and, all in all, a good friend. But I must say … I cannot quite forget that she jots down all that I do and it will end up in a book eventually.” Kowalczyk smiled faintly, and suddenly Taft felt a chill run through his body. “Kowalczyk. You aren’t going to write a book about me, are you?”

  The agent snorted. “I ought to say yes—that’s what you get for insisting your Secret Service agent do double duty as your confidante. No, Mr. President, sir, I intend to devote all my attention to guarding your ass for a long time to come. I’ll let other people worry about analyzing it.”

  When they landed, Rachel was there to meet them, a staff aide in tow. They drove to a nearby diner, one of these gleaming fortresses of greasiness that calls itself Denny’s, and, as Taft squeezed through the narrow aisles between tables, he saw Trevor and Abby waiting for them at a large booth. His heart leapt at the sight of his great-great-granddaughter; this would be her on
e visit to the campaign trail, since her parents were determined to preserve her normal life at home with her father as much as possible while Rachel split the season between stumping with Taft and fulfilling her legislative duties on Capitol Hill.

  With a prudence he was proud to muster, Taft poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot on the table and gulped it down before wedging himself into the booth—a laborious process that, he noticed with a scowl, amused the nearby tables to no end. “Damned shoddy construction,” he muttered, then poured himself another cup of coffee. He could already feel himself sobering up. Oh, Nellie would have had a mouthful to say about his occasional nip at the bottle. Prohibition was nothing but a dim, distant memory to this nation—although, Taft had to admit, what he’d seen of the country’s current legislation against recreational pharmaceuticals was no less misguided and ineffectual. He turned to Abby, hoping the coffee had sufficiently masked the booze on his breath.

  “So, what’s new with you, young lady?”

  She stared at him sternly. “Grandpa, you got bigger.”

  “Ah, well, yes. More of me to love and all that, wouldn’t you say? Speaking of which, unless I’m mistaken, you’ve gotten taller.”

  “How can you tell? I’m sitting down.”

  “Your daughter doesn’t miss a thing, does she?” he said to Trevor.

  Trevor smiled. “Well, she is a Collins. And a Taft.”

  Just then, the waitress came by with a handful of massive menus. Taft opened his and stared at the glorious selection of savory riches detailed therein.

  All in all, Taft decided, the twin thrills of whiskey and coffee stimulating his blood, this trip was starting out swimmingly.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The rallies in delaware and West Virginia had been warm-ups. The ones in Kansas and Wyoming had been surprisingly comfortable. And now, as he stood on the raised platform in the middle of this weathered county fairground and waved happily to satisfying applause from the fine people of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Taft felt a surge of the grudging, nervous excitement that he’d first experienced while stumping in 1908. He glanced to his left, where Rachel sat beaming; she was feeling it, too.

  “As you can see,” he said, his voice booming through the speakers as he gestured to the huge red, white, and blue banners that hung behind him, “great effort has been taken to today to make me appear presidential.” A good-hearted laugh ran through the crowd. “Suffice it to say, I never have. But I take that as a good thing.” He paused for a moment as if expecting to be challenged, but the only sound he could hear was the wind whistling through the nearby trees. “America, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is a democracy, which is much more than a mere political apparatus. At its core, it was intended to be the triumph, the apotheosis, of the people. No despots or tyrants or plutocrats, but people.” A light smattering of applause filled the silence as Taft squared his shoulders. “But I’m not here to reaffirm some image of myself as a common man. Clearly, I am no such thing. In fact, unlike so many of my opponents on both sides of the big-ticket coin, I’m not here to talk about myself at all. I’m here to talk about you.

  “You are America. You are a piece of it, and you are the whole of it. And so is your neighbor. Whoever stands next to you is a part of your existence, as is the person who stands halfway across the country. No part of this country works properly if any part of it is failing, just as no body is healthy if even the smallest cell of it is ill. An entire symphony becomes discordant at the creation of one wrong note. And my opponents have been blowing quite a few of them lately.”

  The crowd seemed to stir, forgoing a laugh at Taft’s obvious punch line in anticipation of his point. They were here to witness a spectacle, a happening, a moment—and, by God, he’d give them one.

  “And just as no man, woman, or child in this country is truly healthy if his neighbor is not, so it goes with two of mankind’s most basic needs: sustenance and education. Trust me, I am well acquainted with both. And I also know, in the essential matters of food and schools, that quantity and quality are not interchangeable. What’s that saying you have these days? ‘Garbage in, garbage out’? For too long, I have come to understand, America has been content to let those in power—the would-be dictators of both the public and private sectors—feed you garbage. This garbage is presented in many forms: lower wages for public school teachers. Political and corporate pressures on curricula. Reckless agribusiness. Relaxed standards and regulations of the food industry. And then there’s the intersection of the two problems: the toxic crossroads we call student lunch. It may seem a small thing, granted, in the grand scheme of this vast nation. But if you want to look at one of the major roots of the lack of self-reliance and the lack of self-regard in this country, look no further. Again, I speak from experience. And if elected, I will not allow such circumstance to stand. It is long past time for the Department of Education to be recognized as one of the most important entities in the entire federal government!”

  Taft paused to allow the crowd a chance to respond. He was greeted with a shuffling of feet. A phone rang. Some pro-Taft signs previously held highly and proudly seemed to dip and wobble with indecision.

  Time seemed to crawl. He’d known this was going to be a hard sell in an America obsessed with terrorism and rampant unemployment and partisan squabbles, but he had to play his own game. Or rather: he had to play no game at all.

  A hand shot up in the third row, and Taft gestured magnanimously in its direction. It was a man—a fat man of perhaps forty, Taft saw, as round as himself though certainly not as tall, wearing thick eyeglasses and sporting an unshaven face.

  “So, Mr. Taft,” the man sneered. “You say that the Department of Education holds the key to America’s future. But there was no such department in the presidential cabinet when you were alive, was there, Mr. Taft? Why should you place such weight on a bureaucracy you couldn’t possibly know anything about?”

  Ah. A heckler. One of those malcontents who’d already decided to shout without listening in return. Taft knew the type well, and they made him cringe. Even when he held the highest office in the land, he’d always striven to appease both sides of any conflict, to compromise and find equitable resolution wherever possible. After all, it appealed to his sense of justice and fairness, the same sense that, early in his career, had led him toward becoming a judge. More than that, though, he’d always been sensitive to the sting of scorn, no matter how slight or even imagined; he always felt guilty when confronted by one of these closed-minded mockers, for surely their misunderstanding arose from his own failure to explain himself successfully. Nellie used to scold him for it. She assumed being president would grow him a thicker hide. He patted his gut, all those extra pounds he’d packed on since being elected, and again since awakening a hundred years later. He smiled sadly. A thicker hide, indeed.

  “I say, sir, it is true that, in my day, the Office of Education was a minor entity in the Interior Department. But although its increased size today doubtless holds some inefficiencies, I find no fault with its enlarged mandate to help educate America’s children. How can we face the future, sir, without teaching our young people all they can possibly know?” He turned to call upon another raised hand, but the fat man shouted back at him.

  “You’re full of shit! You don’t sound like William Howard Taft! You aren’t William Howard Taft! You’re a freaking hoax, and everyone with a brain has got to know it!” His eyes wild, the man suddenly leveled a large, black pistol in Taft’s direction.

  Then several things happened at once.

  As Taft, his imagination long sharpened by the keen awareness that both McKinley and Roosevelt had faced bullets from their constituents, hurled himself sideways to shield Rachel from harm, she did the exact same thing, and the two of them crashed into each other and fell to the stage while, Taft saw out of the corner of his eye, Kowalczyk went flying through the air, over the heads of the first two rows of the crowd, and tackled the fat man in a messy heap.r />
  “Are you all right?” Rachel yelled.

  “Unharmed,” Taft coughed.

  “Stay down,” she said. As people swarmed around them, they turned to look toward the scuffle.

  Kowalczyk stood up, the man’s gun in his hand and the man under the agent’s foot. “It’s not real,” he shouted. “It’s a toy gun. It’s a fake.”

  The fat man began cackling. “It’s as real as he is!” he shouted, pointing at Taft. “It’s every bit as real as he is!”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Taft closed his eyes to shut out the sight of Kowalczyk pacing furiously around their hotel suite. The man was barking instructions into his service radio, and it was giving Taft a headache. Slowly, however, he became aware that his bodyguard was calling for a larger contingent of agents to be dispatched to the campaign, and Taft stood up and motioned furiously for silence. Kowalczyk finished the call and drilled his eyes into Taft’s. “What’s wrong?”

  “Please, Kowalczyk. No additional security! I know fretting about it is your job, but I’m already trapped in this entire century I never asked for. I don’t need the walls around me to be even tighter than they have been!”

  “Bill. Mr. President, sir. We can’t keep allowing you to be so vulnerable. I already can’t believe I went along with your crazy two-man vacation thing, and that nothing worse happened then. Today was a long overdue wake-up call.”

  “Nonsense! And what matter if I had been shot, I ask you. I’m living a charmed second life already. Every day is gravy.”

  “Are you nuts? That’s exactly why we can’t let anything happen to you!” The agent stumbled over his words. “I mean, you know, on top of the fact that you’re our friend, Bill. You’re—you’re a one of a kind miracle. We can’t have William Howard Taft magically come back to life and just let him get killed again!”