I don't understand why so many posters on this thread have been saying Taft was a centrist; he was clearly a pretty conservative President as well as a conservative Chief Justice.
I would say Truman, Eisenhower, Ford, and Clinton was centrists Presidents. I don't know enough about Woodrow Wilson to judge his ideology.
I mean, Roosevelt ran against Taft in part because he broke up TOO MANY trusts (and the wrong ones) ... I'm no expert on him, but I think it's perfectly reasonable to say Roosevelt was more conservative than Taft.
Taft was gung ho about Prohibition, and he tried to avoid getting any liberals on the Supreme Court, both when he was President and when he was CJ. On the Supreme Court he came to a lot of conservative "activist" decisions.
