Oh, now I get it. This is all about Howard Schultz running as a Republican in 2024.
Legendary hot milkshake purveyor Howard Schultz is flirting with an independent run for the presidency, a beleaguered nation learned several days ago. Weeks ago? Did we know this in like 2013 but we just forgot about it? Time is a flat white circle.
Whatever the chronology, his campaign pregaming so far has mainly involved using nonsense phrases (“The big idea is very simple: to unite the country. For us to come together. To do everything we can to realize that the promise of America is for everyone”), getting ratioed on Twitter and exchanging rhetorical gunfire with Democrats. Pundits have read the last development to be a phenomenon worth writing about — both because Schultz has described himself as a lifelong Democrat and everybody loves watching Democrats foul things up, and because he has said several things about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose name when uttered aloud now produces crowds of onlookers instantly. I don’t know where they come from. I think it’s the new thing that happens to people when they bite into a York Peppermint Patty because thanks to climate change, the remaining cold mountains are at capacity.
Schultz is a billionaire who was the CEO of Starbucks. And yes, money and consumer brand affection/chemical dependency on caffeine can bring attention. But serious observers believe it would be almost impossible for an independent candidate to win the presidency in 2020 or perhaps ever. So what’s the point of all this?
As soon as I realized it, it felt so obvious: Howard Schultz isn’t running as an independent in 2020, yinz guys. He’s running as a Republican in 2024, just as sure as the Starbucks you just walked into is out of the one specific kind of cake pop your kid wanted.
I figured it out when I read something Schultz said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Wednesday: “Unions are not the answer. The answer to inequality is comprehensive tax reform.” Compiling this alongside what Schultz had already said, his position is:
- unions are bad
- tax reform is what we need
- but rich people’s taxes shouldn’t go up
Did I mention that moments earlier on Morning Joe, Schultz said his favorite president was Ronald Reagan? Great, I thought. It turns out Howard Schultz is just another generic disingenuous supply-side trickle-down Republican.
Then: It turns out Howard Schultz is just another generic disingenuous supply-side trickle-down Republican. Ohhhh! This is sort of what he is going for.
Schultz obviously doesn’t like Donald Trump or what the Republican party has become (pretty much always was, but I digress). On 60 Minutes over the weekend, Schultz said Trump is “not qualified to be president,” and he has been critical of both Trump’s demeanor and his policies on everything from immigration to the economy. Yet Schultz won’t seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, which would be his easiest path to the presidency, and he is considering an independent campaign that could cut into support for the eventual Democratic nominee and hand Trump another four years in office. It seems to make no sense.
But what if Schultz really isn’t a Democrat or a middle-of-the-roader at heart? What if he’s more like a Marco Rubio or John Kasich: a garden-variety early-2000s Republican who, sure, doesn’t want to cast gay people and people of color directly into the sea, but has no particular interest in making America better for them, or for anyone else besides the “job creator” crowd and the occasional entrepreneur who pulls himself up by nothing but his bootstraps and a seven-figure inheritance?
If I were that kind of Republican, but I was a business leader in extremely liberal Seattle, I’d probably just lie and tell everybody I was a Democrat, solely for expediency. That explains that. (Maryland, where I live, has a lot of this kind of Democrat.) However, if I eventually wanted to run for president as a Republican, I’d have the obvious problem of needing to persuade Republican primary voters that I had truly seen the light.
Politicians at the state and local levels do this all the time. They just switch parties, and the new party is so pleased to pick up an extra legislative seat or office that the switcher is welcomed with a warm public embrace. But — say Schultz has reasoned that these are unusual times: the Trump-hued Republican brand is so damaged that he doesn’t want it right now, but he will need it soon.
And that’s exactly where his current undertakings come in. Here’s the plan:
- Write a book, hit the morning-show circuit, leverage incurious pundits to roll out your new “I don’t like Trump, but I’m not so crazy about the Democrats” identity.
- Whine about the debt and trash-talk progressives as often as possible to make sure the anti-tax crowd takes notice.
- Hang around just long enough to justify some face time in Iowa and New Hampshire.
- Announce that you’ve decided you will not run for president in 2020 (after all, you genuinely don’t want Trump to win, for a variety of reasons).
- Go entirely dark, and cross your fingers that the 2020 winner is a Democrat who has dared to say something as bold as, “Perhaps, in the richest nation on Earth, everyone should have health care.”
- In September of 2021, bleat “I told you so” over Democrats’ efforts to modestly improve the human condition — and declare that you have changed your partisan affiliation to Republican. Spend the next year going around and helping Republicans get elected (in exchange for future considerations).
- Ta-da. At a moment when everyone who was in elected office during the single-term Trump administration has been tarnished by the association, you, Howard Schultz, are the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
Is this a slam dunk? (It’s good to use basketball metaphors when writing about Howard Schultz because of how he sold the Seattle SuperSonics to people who moved the team to Oklahoma City.)
No, it’s not a slam dunk. Trump could win re-election. The Democrats could run as progressives but govern from the cowardly center, making it harder to justify a party switch for Schultz. Even if everything falls into place by 2021, he would still have to outlast other Republican candidates and win over at least some of the GOP’s neo-Confederate base — but hey, even Mitt Romney and John McCain swallowed hard and figured out how to do that.
Nevertheless, the dude is 65, so if he really does want to be president, his window is closing. And if Schultz wants to be the kind of president who does mean things to poor and middle-class people — that is to say, a Republican president — then everything he’s doing now suddenly makes sense. Pissing off Democrats in the most public manner possible is a core strategy. Saying that he doesn’t like unions isn’t a gaffe; it’s an honest reflection of his opinion, dutifully noted in conservative think-tank conference rooms from Washington, D.C., all the way to just outside Washington, D.C. The inconsistent television interviews are just practice.
Pass it on, friends. This isn’t about 2020, it’s about 2024. Howard Schultz is running a long con, and what could more befit a Republican presidential candidate than that?
