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?