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but usually a good assumption. Olson's a fine man and a great lawyer, but I don't see him as the politician type, much less the type to run in, say, southeastern Virginia.

"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill

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Let's nominate the Nash Equilibrium for President.

although Teddy Roosevelt has to share a lot of the credit with him for the debacle of 1912. (TR outpolled Taft, BTW)

Taft was an excellent Chief Justice but an incompetent politician. His election on TR's coattails in 1908 was the only election he ever won in his life.

"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill

Can't blame Taft in 1912, though, for TR deciding to try to punish the Republicans for turning toward conservatism instead of progressivism.

HTML Help Central for Red Staters
Let's nominate the Nash Equilibrium for President.

HTML Help Central for Red Staters
Let's nominate the Nash Equilibrium for President.

agenda in 1912, it was fantastically successful. Woodrow Wilson's administration, despite its "progressive" reputation, was a huge setback for race relations.

Wilson held on for 8 years, not 4, and narrowly won reelection by pledging to keep us out of WWI, which we entered a few weeks after his second inaugural. Wilson blew the chance to get the US to join his League of Nations through his own intransigence in dealing with the reservations of the Senate. Arguably, his wife ran the country during the last two years of his term due to Wilson's illness.

In 1920 the Republicans, sadder but wiser, waged a winning campaign centered around "A Return to Normalcy".

I'd rather not have a repeat, thank you.

If Taft had been a successful and popular President TR would have held his fire, maybe waited for 1916. It wasn't just Taft's ideology but his weakness that invited rebellion.

"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill

I would say it was Taft's lack of leadership skills (he was mostly driven by his wife, not himself) that allowed Senator Aldrich and Speaker Cannon to dominate politics and enact the Payne-Aldrich tariff and reversing TR's enviromental progress.

It's something to be said that Taft himself never wanted to be President. He always wanted to be a Supreme Court justice. His tenure in the White House reflected that.

In terms of TR trying to punish Republicans, I'll remind you that if it weren't for party boss control of the presidential nomination process, as opposed to the system of primaries we have today (which became policy after the failure of 1912), TR would have earned the Republican Party's nomination for President.

I often think of him as the last of the true progressives. The left like to call themselves that, but there is nothing progressive about their agenda.

"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle

is how Taft viewed the Court. Everything he did throughout his legal and political careers was calculated with Chief Justice in mind. Even Chief Justice White's appointment.

I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and say apathy, rather than incompetent. He really didn't care about the presidency, but viewed it as a means to an end.

***

“Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.” – Ronald Reagan

Uhh, how do you explain John Cornyn then?

Jindal/Palin '16

IIRC, Davis did just as bad as Gilmore against Warner in every early poll. Neither are appealing candidates statewide. Isn't it better to have Davis hold a seat that we would've lost otherwise rather than waste money and time on a race he couldn't win, even if he had won the nomination?

Contrary to popular belief, Tom Davis wasn't scared off because of conservative activist. That was a smokescreen. If he was, I'd share your outrage. He was scared off because he simply can't beat Mark Warner. Tom Davis is a fairly popular moderate politician. Mark Warner is a VERY popular moderate politician.

You do not beat a very popular politician with a somewhat less popular politician. Davis would have gone up in smoke, as will Gilmore, for the same basic reason. Instead, you beat them with a non-politician.

That's why I'd support someone like Pace or Olson. They aren't gunning with the same issues, not shooting for the same constituency. They don't have to sell Warner's message better then him, they have to sell a different message entirely.

Jindal/Palin '16