WI: Vice President William Howard Taft

This was an idea I had burning through my head for a while. Sometime in early March 1901, President William McKinley nominates William Howard Taft as his Attorney General, instead of appointing him to be Governor-General of the Philippines. The 1904 Republican National Convention rolls around, and Attorney General William Howard Taft is nominated by acclamation, instead of OTL's Senator Charles W. Fairbanks of Indiana. How differently might things have gone had Taft served as Attorney General and Vice President, rather than Governor-General and Secretary of War? How would this affect his subsequent presidency?
 
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Taft as VP essentially cancels his presidency: no sitting VP was considered seriously for the presidency until Nixon in 1960. Somehow, TR would coerce Elihu Root or George Cortelyou to run as his successor.
 
At that time vice-presidents were not considered to be likely presidents except in the event of the president's death. The vice-presidency was just not thought of as the normal road to the presidency. No sitting vice-president had been elected president since Van Buren, and none had even been nominated to the presidency since Breckinridge--and even he was only the candidate of one half of a split Democratic party.

A vice-president was usually chosen to placate one wing of the party, especially one which wasn't necessarily too happy about the presidential candidate. Fairbanks served that function in both 1904 and 1916--he was liked by congressional conservatives who had reservations about the progressivism of the party's presidential candidate in those years. Taft's record before TR's administration was more judicial than political, and he would not have served that function so well.
 
A big part of the reason vice-presidents weren't seen as likely successsors was that the vice-president didn't really do much of anything. If he's stuck in the vice-presidency, Taft can't build up a reputation in the Phillipines and the War Department, so there's less of a rationale for his candidacy.
 
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