The Boise citizen. (Boise, Idaho) 1906-1910, 1907-02-22
FORECAST
FOR 1908
Roosevelt Desires to
Ndm6 Successor
S OPPOSED TO La Toilette
Mdu Be Forced to Support Hughes
to Save New York

In a forecast of the presidential cam
paign in 1908, Erwin Wardman in the
March Broadway Magazine asserts that
President Roosevelt is desirous of being
the candidate of his party in 1912 and
also intends to dictate the nomination
in 1908. The writer points out that La
Foleltte would be the natural choice of
the reformers of the party, but that
Roosevelt will not permit his nomina-
ton. In our opinion La Toilette is the
only man prominent in the Republican
party upon whom the people can al
ways count and they should take mat
tiers in their own hands and nominate
him. The article does not explain
Roosevelts opposition to the peoples
senator from Wisconsin, but thinks the
mere statement of the presidents oppo-
sition sufficient to kill La Follette's
chances. Here are some interesting ex-
tracts from the article mentioned
"No one of President Roosevelt's in
Inmates questions in the slightest degree
his immovable determination not to be
candidate in 1908. It may be set
down as a fact, requiring only time for
absolute veri6cation, that he would not
take the nomination-that, if he were
nominated and elected against his will,
he would not take the election handed
to him on a gold platter Not in 1908.
Zone of his own cabinet officers says
that the nomination four years later
would be an entirely different matter.
The plan which, according to the letter
of the Roosevelt bond, recllons next
year an impossibility, but not later
period, has contemplated that the place
should be held as a sort of reserve
chair until 1912 For this intermediary
regency, so to speak, the first choice
was George B. Cortelyou, of New York.
"Mr Cortelyou is a comparatively
young man of almost unprecedented
achievement in the government service.
His flight from stenographer's post,
only few years ago, into the cabinet
was not less quiet than swift 1t is
fair question whether it was not de-
served He has an abundance of ad-
ministrative capacity He has been in
telligently responsive to the demands of
those who have been responsible for his
political creation and re-creations He is
very cool, very steady and exceedingly
gracious, for both his person and his
manners are handsome. For the pur-
poses of great minds which exercise
themselves in majestic games he would
certainly stand without hitching. But
when the tearing of the cloak from the
insurance scandals revealed that, as
chairman of the Republican national
committee, Mr. Cortelyou had been
spending campaign contributions lifted
from the trust funds of widows and
orphans, his presidential form was
stretched in the winding sheet"
Then Elihu Root is second choice,
but Mr. Wardman says of him:
Here is the nation willing to consider
another term for Mr.. Roosevelt who
has had a wider and stronger hold
on popular confidence, not to speak of
affection, than any other citizen within
the generation; but here are the same
people apparently implacably averse to
listening to the mere mention of the
man whom the president would give
them in his place And nowhere is the
popular aversion to Root more ineradi-
cable than in his own state of New York,
where he is surprisingly impossible
The writer concludes:
by all the circumstances that count
in balancing radicalism-his steadfast