In Stephen Skowronek's political time schema, Warren G. Harding is a regime manager tasked with restoring the Republican regime established by William McKinley after Woodrow Wilson's interregnum. Harding faced a particularly interesting decision, for although McKinley was the founder of the modern post–Gilded Age Republican regime, his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, was clearly a more dynamic and disruptive force in the party. The overlooked figure in this sequence, however, is William Howard Taft—in some ways a throwback to a pre‐Roosevelt president, but one who prosecuted a reform policy agenda. Presented with three different models of presidential leadership, Harding ignored the progressive conservatism of Taft and returned to a mistakenly Whiggish view of McKinley's leadership. The result was a lost opportunity for Republicans in the 1920s, setting up their repudiation in 1932.