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Election Night 1904

Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, felt the victory coming long before the dispatches reached him. However, the dispatches did surprise him. The idea of winning by a margin of over 2.5 million votes confirmed for him that he had been right. Only six months ago, there was no reason to presume he would even be here.

After a close call with death in February, Senator Mark Hanna had rallied the money men around him and had threatened to take the Presidency from him and give it to that conniving elitist, Charles Fairbanks. Had it not been for the Perdicaris Affair, it was completely possible that he could not even have been in the contest. It was some measure of relief that Hanna had shuffled off to meet his Maker just before the convention, the President thought.

The sound of a clearing throat behind him led the President to face his new deputy, Vice President Nelson W. Aldrich. The aging Rhode Islander had been a concession to the party conservatives, but the two had struck a comfortable deal in the days following the convention. He would get a free hand on foreign and social policy, whilst Aldrich would get to experiment in his favourite field of economics.

One thing was for certain. Prior to the convention, he had discussed with Edith the possibility of announcing that this would be his last term. Now, that was categorically ruled out. The Republican Party could not fall back into the hands of people like Hanna. It had to be preserved and protected, and if to achieve this, he had to hang around in the White House until they carried him out feet first, so be it. He was now President in his own right.
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