The Good, the Bad, and the Ridiculous from Howard Schultz’s Great Big Presidential Interview
Aspiring presidential candidates should watch the retiring Starbucks CEO’s chat with CNBC to learn how not to talk to the American people about the economy
Yesterday morning, outgoing Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz gave a chummy exclusive interview to CNBC. I’m not using the word “chummy” lightly, here: one of the interviewers literally prefaces his question with a request to hang out together sometime, now that the CEO is stepping down as the head of Starbucks.
Most of the interview revolved around the rumors that Schultz is considering a presidential run in 2020. He responded with all the classic non-denials you’d expect of someone who’s seriously considering a run for the presidency.
“Let’s just see what happens. I’ve got lots of things to think about. I’m writing a book,” Schultz demurred when asked directly about the rumors. He humbly offered that he’s not trying to feed the fire of presidential speculation with his goodbye tour as CEO—he’s merely “trying to advance the cause of the national conversation.”
Sitting in front of a Starbucks display case stocked with three large loaves of bread, Schultz expressed his dismay that the country had lost its “dignity,” and suggested that he’d be the one to bring that dignity back.
These puffball pre-presidential-run interviews are always bullshit, of course. Every interviewer agrees—implicitly or explicitly—not to ask any challenging questions, in order to give the interviewee a nice, clean platform on which they can lay out their candidate agenda.
So let’s talk about that agenda.
The Good
Schultz said some important stuff about fixing immigration, gun safety, trade, helping veterans, and fixing tax policy. He identified problems, including the opioid crisis, the housing crisis, and America’s yawning racial divide, that many candidates couldn’t even be bothered to address back in 2016. And Schultz was at his best when he talked about the garbage Trump tax cuts.
“Corporate America did not need a tax cut to 21 percent when we could’ve done so much more for the people of this country,” Schultz said, adding that “forty-five percent of the people in America don’t have $400 in the bank for a crisis.”
That’s a great message, and Schultz is a perfect messenger for it. As a recipient of the Trump tax scam, Schultz has amazing credibility in this field. He’s gifted at explaining why valuing corporate profits over citizen stability is a bad bet every time.
Had Schultz stopped talking right there, I’d be taking his presidential run seriously. Unfortunately, he kept talking. For about a half an hour.
The Bad
Most of what Schultz unleashed on those interviewers was market-tested hot air. He spoke vaguely about “restor[ing] the promise of the country and our standing around the world.” You’re going to be really tired of hearing this kind of pabulum by the time the Iowa caucuses start in 2020, I promise.
“We’re all in this together,” Schultz added when he talked about the importance of America’s character. “We have to love our fellow countrymen…it’s been a long time since anyone in government has walked within the shoes of the American people,” Schultz, who is worth nearly three billion dollars, announced to the fawning interviewers.
And then Schultz unrolled what he seems to think is going to be the central issue of his campaign. No, it’s not raising the minimum wage or restoring the middle class to the center of the American economy. It’s…fixing the national debt?
“We have a 21 trillion dollar debt,” Schultz said in what was arguably one of the most passionate moments of the interview. “These things are unsustainable,” he concluded.
The national debt is a topic that gets rolled out and wheeled around every once a generation or so. I can recall it surfacing twice in my lifetime—first with the rise of Ross Perot as a presidential candidate, and then as a weapon by the Tea Party. Both times, the debt kicked off a lot of emotional rhetoric, and then faded from the conversation.
Look, this is a complex subject, and a lot of people have done a lot of writing on it. But it boils down to this: people who argue that the economy should be run like a business, or who make facile analogies between the national debt and personal finance, are either disingenuous or dumb. Here are some facts you should always keep in mind with the debt:
- The global economy is a complicated latticework of assets, debt, and cooperation. One simple analogy isn’t going to explain any of it.
- You can’t treat the national debt like a bottomless IOU jar. But you can’t treat it like it’s a final-notice credit card bill, either.
- People have been predicting death and destruction caused by the national debt since the earliest days of this nation. The entire bill is not going to suddenly come due—or if it does, the world will have bigger problems than just a defaulted loan.
Perhaps most importantly, if Schultz believes he can attract a majority of American voters by talking about the national debt, he’s seriously miscalculating his constituency.
The American people only care about the debt when it’s politically convenient for them—when it gave the Tea Party a polite excuse to hate the first black president, for instance—and then they immediately forget about it when the moment has passed. (Consider Paul Ryan, who started his career in public life by warning about ballooning debt and ended his career in public life by hugely adding to it with his corporate tax breaks.)
Schultz’s concern with the debt is weirdly tone-deaf for a potential 2020 candidate, when there are so many other crises he could prioritize instead. It’s indicative of an ivory-tower mindset that belies the common-man rhetoric Schultz promotes the rest of the time.
Both parties contribute to the national debt, and the sheer size of the numbers involved always make for a scary headline or two. But those numbers don’t affect the things that ordinary Americans care about. They care about paying rent, planning for the future, and finding a financial stability that now feels impossible. What does Schultz have to say about that? Well, I’m glad you asked.
The Absolutely Ridiculous
So Schultz believes that the national debt is the greatest existential crisis that our nation is facing right now. (It isn’t.) How does Schultz intend to fight that (not real) crisis? “We’ve gotta grow the economy, in my view, 4 percent or greater,” Schultz told the CNBC brown-nosers, “and then we’ve gotta go after entitlements.”
Hold on, what?
Howard Schultz, a man who is worth nearly three billion dollars…a man who is right now the CEO of a company that has committed to return $20 billion in profit to shareholders (and not employees) through buybacks and dividends over the next two years…thinks the big save for the American economy is cutting entitlement programs? Medicare and SNAP and unemployment are the problem—not corporate greed and a tax system that steals from the poor and gives to the rich?
Yep, that’s what he says. In fact, he says it twice in the same interview. Here, he frames slashing entitlements as the sensible, centrist thing to do when one of his interviewers tries to frame Schultz as a liberal:
Take the liberal piece out of it. Let’s take a centrist approach to getting ideology out. We can get to four percent growth. We can go after entitlements. And we can do the right thing, if we have the right people in place who are talking about what it is to be an American as opposed to being a Republican or a Democrat and getting all of these issues out of the way so we can fix the problems of the country.
I’m gonna go ahead and say it: what Schultz calls “centrist” and ideology-free is an outright Republican stance. Only one party on the national level is working hard to cut entitlements, and that’s not the Democrats. You can’t claim to be free from partisanship and then take a purely partisan stance.
Of course, in order to pay lip service to nonpartisanship, Schultz made it pretty clear that he’s no fan of Trump and the modern GOP. But in classic cable talk-show “both-sides” form, he felt it necessary to take a swing at Democrats, too, to show how fair he is:
I will say that it concerns me that so many voices within the Democratic Party are going so far to the left. And I ask myself how are we going to pay for all these things, in terms of things like single-payer or people espousing the fact that the government is going to give everyone a job. I don’t think that’s realistic. And I think we’ve gotta get away from all these falsehoods and start talking about the truth and not false promises.
The billionaire is going to tell the American voter that their dreams of going to the emergency room without going broke, or of finding a good-paying job when the market tanks due to unregulated corporate greed, are unrealistic. The leader of a wildly profitable corporation wants you to know that higher wages for all is a “falsehood.” A man who has bought entirely into the belief that business experience is all you need to lead the nation is concerned with “talking about the truth,” even though he has seen the results of both the nation’s first MBA president and the nation’s first CEO president.
What He Should’ve Said
Schultz asks a pointed question in the middle of his rant about jobs guarantees and single-payer health care: “how are we going to pay for all these things?”
Uh, I dunno. Maybe by raising your goddamned taxes, Howard? Maybe by responsibly taxing corporations like, oh, say, Starbucks and making sure they can’t shovel immoral amounts of worker-created profits off to shareholders without consequence?
Maybe by making sure that employers pay a living wage to employees, so that they can then spend that money in their communities? By ensuring that enough Americans feel financially secure that they’re excited to start small businesses again? By establishing a system in which no family ever falls into bankruptcy when the youngest, most vulnerable member of that family is born with an incurable disease?
We pay for these things by remembering who the American dream is really about—not the messiah-complex CEOs who surround themselves with yes-men, but the actual Americans who get out there and work every goddamned day so they can build a better life for themselves and their children, and their communities. Because they’re where community and prosperity really begin in America, not in corporate boardrooms or on the set of a CNBC softball interview.
Here’s a piece of free campaign advice for Howard Schultz: You can’t successfully run for president by telling the American people what they can’t do. You get there by reminding them what they’re capable of.
And frankly, in this interview I think Schultz has proven that he doesn’t have what it takes. He’s just another trickle-downer with an inflated sense of self-importance, and I can’t wait to watch his presidential campaign flame out spectacularly.
