Howard Schultz barely seems to want the White House. He comes to the national stage with plenty of pithy aphorisms and apt diagnoses of the problems corroding American politics, but his proposed solutions, when they exist, seem more at the level of a high school debate team rather than a self-made billionaire.
But that may be the very point to the will-he, won’t-he drama Schultz has added into the 2020 fracas.
Chaos has been baked into the Democratic primary since the moment Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. With a president as unabashedly polemical as President Trump replacing former President Barack Obama, the Democratic Party was all but destined to take a sharp turn leftward. Half of the 2020 candidates spent the past two years auditioning for the Oval Office, with the prisoner’s dilemma of a classroom full of politicians keen to prove they’re the greatest avatars of the resistance leading them to all try to outflank each other with increasingly partisan policies.
In an election this extreme by design, the only spoiler would be a candidate calling back to the center. Hence, all the liberal outrage over an anodyne billionaire from Seattle mulling a presidential bid.
Schultz lacks the nerdy charm of Bill Gates, the ruthless charisma of Steve Jobs, the comic book antics of Jeff Bezos, and the very unstable genius of Elon Musk. His character hasn’t entered our cultural consciousness in the same way any other billionaire who’s flirted with the presidency has. But like Starbucks itself, with its reliably mediocre coffee and inoffensive soft rock and earth-hued ambiance, Schultz has widespread, albeit tepid appeal. If his CNN town hall proved anything, it’s that Schultz isn’t running as a spoiler but as a champion of our collective annoyance with the kabuki theater of the past two and a half years.
As our national debt crosses the $22 trillion threshold for the first time without so much as a shrug from our lawmakers, Schultz has made addressing our spending crisis a key component of his platform. Schultz says we “should be building bridges” instead of walls, but also that we can’t let bad people in. He should be paying more taxes, he argues, but decries the 70 percent top marginal income tax rate touted by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. Global warming, he concedes, does threaten planetary destruction, but replacing or upgrading every single building within a decade, as demanded by the “Green New Deal,” would require completing construction on thousands of buildings per day.
If the United States were a parliamentary democracy, we’d have passed a vote of no confidence of our ruling parties long ago. Republicans shut the government down at the eleventh hour before they lost the House for border security funding they failed to seriously work on during the two previous years when they controlled every branch of the federal government. Democrats spent that time grandstanding and swearing they would resist Trump.
As primary season kicks into gear, do they have a champion running on abolishing Trump’s trade war, investing in nuclear power, or patching up Obamacare? No, instead they’re endorsing genociding all the farting cows and abolishing air travel while they trot out every possible tax proposal to chase job creators out of the country.
[Read more: Howard Schultz rips the ‘Green New Deal’: ‘It’s not realistic’]
As Schultz’s town hall made clear, he may be a billionaire, but even he admits he’s no economist and certainly no policy wonk. Schultz laments that the corporate tax rate reduction didn’t demand that companies make reforms to improve the lives of their workers, but clearly doesn’t consider the amount of jobs brought back to the country by bringing the rate down to a globally competitive value. He ran an international chain so actually woke that it offered free college to its employees and enacted eco-friendly reforms, but Schultz said on national television that he “doesn’t see color” when asked about race relations. He correctly notes that the far left wants to confiscate all of our guns and abolish the Second Amendment, but he then said that criminals shouldn’t own guns, a stipulation that’s already law.
But these worries, the diagnoses of what he considers problems, aligns far closer to what the silent majority of the country believes. For all of the mudslinging between the GOP and Democrats about the wall versus amnesty, most Americans want to protect our borders but also don’t care much if law-abiding and self-sufficient illegal immigrants are granted some sort of legal status. Schultz’s propositions may sound milquetoast, but just like Frappuccinos, there’s a reason his political proverbs feel so basic: on some level, most of the nation likes them.
Schultz hasn’t even decided whether or not he’s actually running for president, and if he does, he won’t spark much inspiration in or devotion from the public. But if it takes a billionaire to bring back the concerns of the everyman in the political arena, so be it.
