Taft for our times

This is my Sunday column for the April 7, 2013 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune.

Taft 2012: A Novel” by Jason Heller was clearly packaged to fuel the zeitgeist of last year’s election, spoofing targets from the media, to the tea party, modern politics and obesity in general. I read the book just recently, after all the craze had died down and it was apparent that a real “Draft Taft” movement was not forthcoming.

I’m pleased to report that “Taft 2012” has a shelf date beyond its title.

A book like this could get bogged down in the details. How on earth could the late William Howard Taft be a character in a novel about contemporary American politics? Well, quite simply, it’s best not to think about that. In this story William Howard Taft appears stark naked in the year 2012, after having disappeared mysteriously almost 100 years earlier. We never learn why. It’s just part of the story.

From Taft 2012

Instead, Heller pens a hard sprint through this baffling event. Taft returns a kindhearted, whip-smart, gigantic remainder of another era, and after just a few weeks is more or less oriented to this new world. Calls that this Taft is a fraud are assuaged by the fact that he knows a secret code that all presidents are given by their predecessors. Again, that must suffice and, if the spirit catches you, it does.

This Taft is no fraud. He’s a hungry gentleman of strenuous curiosity. His health is remarkably good, though his weight creeps up throughout the book. Loosely based on an historical understanding of President Taft, the character fills the pages, cast as the holy grail of politicians: too honest to make deals, too humble to seek the reins of power, but who has a natural ability to do both. Taft’s anger and shame over his own failures, his 1912 defeat, and the loss of his friendship with former president and 1912 rival Theodore Roosevelt rest at his substantial core.

William Howard Taft was the first sitting U.S.
President to throw out the first pitch at a
Major League Baseball game. The practice
is now considered tradition.

Taft 2012 benefits from the historical knowledge that, plopped down from his time, Taft’s views represent an almost ideal concept of a “sensible, moderate president” in our time. He’s fiscally conservative, but willing to call out corporations. He hates waste but trusts the role of government. He’s progressive on social justice issues. What if the perfect candidate on paper was a 300-pound Unitarian from the past?

In the book, the Taft Party movement, cast in much the same light as 2010’s Tea Party, crops up on just this theory.

Without revealing too much about the plot’s conclusion, Heller’s book has the net effect of being as much about the cheap, unhealthy processed foods of our times as much as its politics. In fact, it makes a compelling argument that they are one in the same. Taft’s personal weaknesses from his time have in some way gripped the nation. One gets the sense that there are number of toilets in this book worthy of military decoration for valor and sacrifice. One also leaves with the impression that Taft, and the country, find a way to wrestle their demons and find happiness … in 2020, of course.

Eugene Debs

The book reminded me of my reading of James Chace’s “1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs — The Election that Changed the Country,” a reminder that this remarkable election provided not two but four of the most compelling candidates in American political history. The least interesting among them ended up winning that year. Roosevelt might have been the most interesting person of the century. One could argue that the next most interesting was the one who carried the towns and lumber camps of immigrant regions like ours here in northern Minnesota’s Iron Range: the socialist Eugene Debs. Debs was in prison (for being a socialist) during much of the campaign.

So 1912 was quite a year! Nevertheless, it is Taft who earns the unexpectedly enjoyable encore in Heller’s amusing novel “Taft 2012.”

Aaron J. Brown is an author and community college instructor on the Iron Range. He writes the blog MinnesotaBrown.com and hosts 91.7 KAXE’s Great Northern Radio Show on public stations.

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