The possible independent candidacy for president of Starbucks coffee high muckety-muck/billionaire Howard Schultz has Democrats fuming like a vente on a January morning in Chicago, while Republicans snicker. What’s the matter, liberals? Don’t you believe in democracy?
Well, yeah, we do, but we also believe in winning. Besides the which, rage is all the rage these days, and has been for some time. The Tea Party was nothing but “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more” for white folks, culminating in that gift that keeps on giving, Donald Trump, and now Democrats have got that rage thing going too, and, anyway, it’s a lot safer to “rage” at old white guy billionaires than feckless teen-agers, even if they do have southern accents and wear Donald Trump hats.
But what’s the deal with Howie, after all? Is he a fit target for hate? Well, I try not to do hate in politics. I don’t think it works, and I don’t think it’s healthy. But I’m way not a fan of Howie either.
Jonathan Chait, over at New York, has written ¾ of my article for me, so if you believe in, well, honor, you might as well skip the rest of this and go read Johnnie, but if not, I can say this:
Howard’s critique of the “new wave” of Bernieites, Lizzieites, and Alexandriaites is about 90% on point, but that 10% ain't chump change. If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ever learns to add, she’ll be dangerous, but right now, not so much. Still, she’s expanded the horizon, dared to say, and succeeded in making it acceptable, that taxes on “the rich” should be raised rather than lowered, which is definitely a good thing. And, more generally, there’s no question that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were far too obsequious to, and generally absorbed by, the billionaire boys and girls club. If Hillary Clinton hadn’t been so greedy for those big Goldman Sachs bucks, which were totally irrelevant to her needs—she needed the money to buy baby shoes for her granddaughter?—Bernie Sanders would have had much less traction running against her, would not have energized the long-dormant paleolib wing of the Democratic Party, allowing even a deeply flawed Hillary to lead a united (united, but not terribly happy about it) Democratic Party to victory in 2016. But Hillary somehow just “couldn’t” keep her hands off all that easy long green, and the paleos were invigorated, and (in their own minds, at least), they won BIG in November, and they ain’t taking no neoliberal shit no more.
So that’s the ideological side of the story. And, anyway, as neoliberals go, Howie (remember him?) is pretty awful. In general, Howie is a “Democrat” only because he lives on the West Coast. If he were east of the Hudson, he’d be that quasi-extinct species, the Rockefeller Republican, who these days can be defined as people who are as rich as Rockefeller, if not more so. Howie’s right that “fuck the rich” is not a viable economic policy, but “cutting entitlements on the basis of what’s going to happen 20 years from now” is not a viable political one. Lord Melbourne (you remember him, don't you?) supposedly said “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” Well, I don’t believe that, but I do believe that when it isn’t necessary to change, it’s impossible to change.1
What’s really irritating for us Democrats (us sensible Democrats) is the obvious possibility that an independent Schultz candidacy could pull anti-Trump centrists away from the Democratic candidate, whoever she may be, particularly because it will be “unlikely” that any Democrat will be able to win the nomination without endorsing “Medicare for All,” which most Americans do not want—what they want is the subsidized health insurance they’re already getting through their employer.
What’s frightening about Howie is that he sounds very much like a man on a mission. Here is what he said at a recent interview: “Can you imagine what a powerful signal it would send to the Congress and the country if, for the first time since George Washington, an independent person could be elected president.”
To a skeptic/cynic like me, this sounds very much like a man who thinks, not that he could be this country’s second George Washington, but that he should be this country’s second George Washington, and that’s a very bad way to think. Both Schultz’s political thinking—that 40% of the voters in this country are “Independents”—and his “policy” thinking—“We just get a bunch of smart people in a room and we lick this thing”2—are banal. But his ego is even bigger than his bank account. It’s not an attractive combination.
Afterwords
Schultz’s personal story, which you can read online for free via the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon for his autobiography, is touching. He grew up in a poor, unhappy, dysfunctional Jewish family in a housing project in New York, his passive mother and father dominated by his grasping “Nana”, a penny-pinching monster straight out of Balzac or Dostoyevsky. But he quickly left all that behind.
1. Even at the height of the Tea Party frenzy over “cutting spending”, which was much more about cutting off Barack Obama’s balls than about the budget—because he had cut Medicare—Congress lacked the courage to make any decisions about cutting spending. The “sequestration” process—which actually did limit spending—was a “placeholder” for decisions to come, decisions that Congress was afraid to make and never made.
2. And that’s all he has. Despite the fact that he obviously thinks of himself as brilliant, he has no substantial policy ideas at all—just that people “like him” should be in charge.
