An Open Letter to Howard Schultz
Pay The Shocker to help you buy the presidency
by Chris Alarie and John Wilmes
Mr. Schultz, Howard — may we call you Howard? — you announced your interest in a self-funded, independent campaign for the presidency in 2020. And yeah, you’ve taken a fair amount of criticism for it. But we know that you’re different from all the other withered, old billionaires who contemplate running for the supreme office in the land out of a powerful concoction of ennui and self-fellating ego. Plenty of billionaires are cheapskates, but how many of them are creative enough to give Starbucks gift cards to the employees of their NBA team that are custom made to be worth less ($3.50) than the minimum amount ($5) available to normal customers? Only you, Howie baby. Only you.
So you’re probably hearing some of the criticism out there. Lots of people are saying you’re going to steal voters from the Democratic nominee and get Trump re-elected. Others have pointed out that your hopelessly anachronistic “Socially liberal, fiscally conservative” is distinctly at odds with what the public believes and wants. But you’re not gonna listen to that, are you? No, of course not! Fuck that! Everybody who you know, from your fellow billionaires to your family members to your employees to the employees of your fellow billionaires and their families, agrees with you. So the only problem is messaging. And since you’re a former CEO, we know you’re more of a broad strokes guy — and no strokes are more broad than a presidential campaign based more or less entirely on deficit reduction and “a return to civility” — who doesn’t really have the time or inclination to get into the details.
We at The Shocker are not really into the details either, to be honest, but we can still help you. You’ve said that you’re “not trying to win the Twitter primary” so why not let The Shocker win it for you? We’re offering our services as political strategists and messaging consultants for a mere $20 million — a bargain at twice the price! And as a proof of concept, please check out this batch of campaign strategies and suggestions:
- The first step is a basic rebrand: stop going by Howard and start going by Howie. Howard sounds like the name of the dad in a 1980s teen comedy whose wife is always hectoring him to do the yardwork (“Howwwward, mow the lawn!”) while Howie sounds like the name of the cool friend in a 1980s teen comedy who helps the protagonist get laid. Put on some shades, pop your collar, and introduce the world to Howie!
- We know that deficit reduction is your big thing but that can be kind of a hard sell to voters in an era of rising populism. So, to spread this message, we propose that you rent (or even just buy — after all, it’s just money) a fleet of dirigibles, from which your team will drop hundreds of thousands of copies of the Simpson-Bowles Report onto American cities and towns. It’ll be hard for people to ignore the problem of rising deficits when the bipartisan report on the matter is literally hitting them in the face after being thrown from an incredibly dangerous height.
- We’ve heard that you’re a bit of a NBA fan. You can appeal to NBA hipsters by peppering your speeches and interviews with a wide variety of takes on such topics as what you think Kevin Durant will do in free agency or what the league should do about the overproliferation of three pointers or what a shame it is that Seattle doesn’t have a NBA team (can’t remember why).
- You should piss and shit into a bunch of Starbucks cups and hand them out at your rallies. Don’t ask us what this is supposed to accomplish. Politics is more alchemy than science.
- Authenticity is a big thing in contemporary politics and voters have always wanted to get a sense of the real personality of candidates. That’s part of why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s livestreams have been so popular. You should steal her approach and start doing livestreams where you answer questions from potential voters while just going about some of the things that make up your daily routine: having your personal chef cook you dinner, having your chauffeur drive you from your opulent mansion to your opulent pied a terre before heading to your opulent beach house, having your personal trainer inject you with your daily dose of youth blood, bathing in money, bathing your money, screaming and belittling your employees not because they made mistakes but because you need to reinforce your dominance, taking a walk in the park. You know, normal, relatable stuff. People want to get to know the real Howie.
- “HOWIE will you pay for all this; only Big Howie can balance the American checkbook”: this is a line that we will write for you, Mr. Schultz, for a debate against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that we can definitely make happen. Debate, you see, is an important form of democratic communication and not at all just the sportsification of stuff that decides who gets to live and die.
- How-man’s son Jordan Schultz has an NBA podcast with Portland Trailblazers guard and horny media wannabe C.J. McCollum. Kevin Durant, who had long been one of the most hated men in the NBA, briefly rekindled public favor for himself by once appearing on this podcast and laughing his ass off at McCollum for over-inflating his Blazers’ title chances. If, somehow, our guy Howie ever encounters a P.R. snafu, we will keep “showing up on the podcast to laugh at C.J. McCollum” as our ace in the hole. Plus, as a bonus, you can use, “I’m trying, Jennifer” as a clever reference and go-to line for any situations on the campaign trail where the press or the public try to offer any sort of criticism.
- We promise to keep you updated with the most current slang, so as not to appear too old and out of touch while also avoiding that Hillary Clinton-ish, “Pokemon go to the polls” rut. Try this one on for size: “Cutting the capital gains tax whips ass, actually. It fucks. It shits itself in the shower.”
Listen, Howie, Howdy Doody, How-a-low-a-lam-dam-ding-dong, you’re golden. You know it. We know it. Sure, your ideas are both bad and unpopular but that doesn’t mean you can’t become president. You just need help communicating with the voting public. We think that we’ve demonstrated above just how much we can help you with that. But this is just a sample, a “tast for nouht.” We’re saving the really good stuff for when you take us up on our offer and hire The Shocker to run your campaign. You won’t regret it.
