William Howard Taft Quotes
Politics, when I am in it, makes me sick.
He was not very good at it. Taft was an excellent Supreme Court Justice, and had good management skills, but could never get the hang of relating to people—the electorate or the Congress. He is the only major party presidential candidate to come in 3rd, and he was the incumbent. Administratively, he had not been a bad President but his poor people skills required him to pander to the right wing base of his own party and this angered his former mentor Theodore Roosevelt who ran against Taft in the Republican primary. Taft moved to the right still further and so angered TR that he ran against Taft as an independent in the general election. Woodrow Wilson won, but Roosevelt came in second and beat Taft handily.
William Howard Taft, 1857-1930, 27th President of the United States (Republican, OH), Chief Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court, Quoted in Archibald W. Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 1930
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
William Howard Taft was the 27th president of the United States (1909–1913) and the tenth Chief Justice of the United States (1921–1930), the only person to have held both offices. Taft was elected president in 1908, the chosen successor of Theodore Roosevelt, but was defeated for reelection by Woodrow Wilson in 1912 after Roosevelt split the Republican vote by running as a third-party candidate. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Taft to be chief justice, a position he held until a month before his death.
